Empowering a New Generation of Front Line Workers.

Recruiting and retaining talent is a top concern for management as the global workforce transitions to the “millennial” generation.  Every time I am in front company executives across industries and regions of the world, yes operational efficacy comes up, but always the deep conversation and search for ideas comes around the changing operational workforce, and associated workspace.

The diagram below illustrates the changing workforce:  

While mundane tasks will continue to get more automated, what work remains in terms of executing on the front-lines warrant a smarter workforce to deal with the corresponding rise in process complexity and product velocity of the value chain. Or a Operational System that abstracts this increased and evolving complexity into the system, allowing variability in the workforce experience and skill. In other words, for those on the industrial front-lines, the boundaries between physical vs. information work will continue to erode – which in turn, changes the very nature of the software applications to support these workers.  

The next generation of industrial software must be able to propel the productivity frontier to new limits while accommodating the new expectations of the Millennial workforce. Examples include:       

• Information at the fingertips: The information they demand to do their job must be equal to or better than their experience as consumers of mobile, social and collaborative technologies.

• Work to be rewarding: They can accept tough work conditions if it offers them the autonomy to contribute in their own way in order to keep them engaged and committed.

•  Change jobs more often: As opportunities to grow “up the career ladder” shrink, they will seek lateral mobility for growth, putting greater pressure on software applications to accelerate “time to proficiency” and performance consistency.

As I sit in the Karoo in Southern South Africa, on Easter weekend away with a number of senior managers of companies in different aspects of manufacturing. The conversations do discuss the future of economics, but the big discussion comes back to workforce transformation, skill set development and retention, and new culture and work method with the Gen Y, how to maintain their engagement and interest. In this country (South Africa) where there has been a significant departure of “baby boomer and gen x” over the last 20 years, leaving the current level of Gen Y in the workforce is already at levels of 2020 expectations in western world (40%).

The issue is how to train, retain, and develop skill and experience, so that companies maintain the required output efficiency. The nice part of the discussion is the reality that it is not a transition of workforce, that it is a totally new workforce that will engage, operate and work totally different to the traditional Gen X and before, and the development of an company/ operational culture that is exciting to attract and retain talent is key.

The big question is can this exciting, attractive culture/ experience be created in an economical and sustained way, especially in the current cost restrictive climate? This then leads to a discussion on the alternative discussion around “generalization “ of “activities” through templatisation of processes, and information, so that decisions and actions can be abstracted from the variability in the experience levels of the work force.  The key assumption is worker experience will vary, and your operational practices will evolve and improve with the business at an ever faster rate, the operational systems of 2020 need to enable a workforce of different skill sets to work in a consistent manner making consistent timely decisions and taking proven actions.

The airline industry has done this with pilots being able to move across different plans, meet their operational team ½ hour before flight, and key still act in a timely and consistent manner. Perfect example was the “Hudson River Incident” where the pilots met ½ hour before take-off, and in the 3 minute flight they took actions only speaking once due to repeatable proven procedures to achieve a successful outcome. 

Why cannot we do the same with the industrial landscape and systems, so that we assume that workforce will change, evolve and the operational systems can accommodate this change while maintaining operational efficiency??     

Effective Situational Awareness (Actionable Decisions) requires “Engineers to evolve to Artists.”

Industrial situational Awareness is a key concept for the future of supervisory/ operational systems. Moving beyond ASM (abnormal situational Management standards) which have had mixed success, not due to standard, but due to implementations. Understanding this subtle difference in implementation is when we start talking “engineers evolving to an artistic, human factor aware.”

This image shows a traditional process screen with photo like images, and the right hand image shows the intensity of eye focus based upon color and drawings. The issue is the awareness of the alarms up the top or indication symbols up the top are lost, this is where the ASM brings a cleaner view, as seen in the image below where this same screen has been evolved to ASM. Yet even that design can be improved.

So why 3rd Generation MES , Model driven industrial Operations is the Only Path for Today's world

A lot of reactions to last 3 weeks of blogs, interest and discussion, but that discussion has been direct with me on email or face to face, pity as many you miss out.

The discussions reinforced that the time of model driven operational solutions is here and not for one reason but many, and that it really is the only way to develop an architecture that can grow in functionality and agility and size. As well as deal with the transformation of the operational workforce, and the new paradigm this will bring with the dynamic, short tenure ship.

Combine this with the agility to evolve, add differential value through the capture best operational practices, embedded them, and evolve them.

Time and time again CEOs and COOs say as they move to off the shelf products, their differentiation will be based on the operational practices that put into practice.

Last week I discussed the critical move away from customization in solutions to configuration, within the framework of the tools. A lot of the feedback, this week, was in agreement that their existing MES type solutions either custom( internal) or first or second generation MES with significant customization have worked well in a STABLE operational environment. Over and over again the comment came that it is time for change, to a system that can:

1/ Enable evolution of operational practices by capturing the best practices

2/Rapid product introduction and evolutions

3/ the ability to scale over multiple sites in a sustainable way with common product definitions across the sites.

4/ transparency across site and multi site eg the value chain

5/ empowerment of decisions in the NOW and consistency of actions across different roles, shifts

Two feedbacks this week relative to the modern operational system:

1/ MES functionality as defined by Mesa and ISA95 is a commodity

2/ assume operational/ production change 3/ assume operational workforce, people transition and evolution

These are key comments when we consider why the 3rd generation MES based upon core MES functionality in a scalable architecture naturally extended with model driven (workflow) operational practice capture.

So I get shocked when I hear that people are still saying develop a custom MES/ MOM system, why waste the energy on a mature technology, and focus your energy on differentiating through the capture and embedding of operational practices and actions, while empowering decisions in the NOW across the operational community in the organization.?

Operational Innovation !! Technology is here but Culture Needs to Evolve!

Through the travels of the last 2 months talking with many of the leading companies in mining and other industries the concept of “Operational Innovation” is a hidden objective. Why is it hidden because it is not natural for innovation to driven from all parts of the business, companies have a habit of centralizing it. Actually we can all contribute to innovational improvement to the way to take on, execute our “jobs to be done” during the day.

There is always ways to improve, but the key item I see being missed is the “culture not just innovates, and try”, but capture this and embed it. Innovation is about lifting constraints of risk to enabling trying to change items with improvements, yes this means making “failure” as a success measure. When I say failure people look at me twice in the industrial space. But I am talking constructive failure e.g. freeing people up with an environment where they can try new ideas on improving their job, and this experiment/ trial is done in a safe none intrusive environment into the plants operations. But the user is able to allocate time, and feels empowered to come up with ideas, and try them. Once the improvement is validated and tested, the ability capture this and embed it for consistency across plants and teams. Diagnram below comes from ARC comparing the effects of embedding processes vs manual implimentation this takes a significant leap even further ahead if you build in operational innovation culture and systems into your industrail operations.