Enabling flexible operational teams

What would happen if we went 25 years back in time and used the systems of today, or what would happen if we used these same systems for the next 25 years? For those living in the past it would feel alien and for those living in the future, the systems would be ready for the museum. So what exactly do we need?

The pace of change is increasing with a previously unseen level of complexity, so companies will need to have programs in place to protect their assets and increase operational effectiveness - through aligning the human assets, and empowering them. This means that companies should be forward thinking and start implementing a platform that can help them to embrace the coming changes.

In today’s organisations, the ability to change and evolve must be a natural part of the company’s environment, culture and systems - and the only asset with the necessary reasoning capacity for making complex decisions is the human one.

As I speak with executives in the leading process companies - in oil and gas, power, mining, utilities (water) and general manufacturing - the question of the empowerment of operations personnel is the difficult but critical key to success in the operational excellence journey.

At this time a significant cultural transition of the workforce is going on. By 2020, 60% of today’s leaders will retire and with this a lot of experience is leaving. Generation Y will make up 42% of the workforce and the average tenure will be less than 2.5 years. Don’t forget that they are ‘digital natives’ who expect instant access to knowledge. If companies want to be competitive, decisions must be in real time, where operational agility requires collaboration no matter the location.

Taking all these factors into consideration, we will require a rethink of today’s operational experiences, across the existing automation systems, and aligned with the existing business system, but empowering a flexible operational team. A team made up of different roles, and with varying expertise - where people on-site work with an operational centre and a virtual team of experts - all on-hand accessing the same trusted information. Targets and KPIs are aligned to roles in their context, but with governance, so that decisions stay aligned with the company’s high-level strategy.

Addressing that significant change will require a combination of techniques:

• A new generation operational interface - offering embedded knowledge, experience, actionable procedures and natural intelligence.
• A new operational experience design - in which the availability of information content is device independent.
• New alignment across disparate systems - applications and sites aligned to operational contexts and actions.
• Collaboration and team sharing - a common information and supervisory control model that naturally enables sharing, collaboration and notification across team members in real time across multiple interfaces and over multiple devices.
• Consistency - interface experience, notifications, and operational actions and processes across teams and sites should be consistent to reliably support rotating roles and people.
• A new operational culture - sharing and asking needs to be natural within the organisation.
• Time to experience - self-service learning and intuitive systems, enabling decisions based on the past, the current and the future.

Yesterday an enterprise was managed as a group of independent companies, tomorrow the successful enterprises will be operated as one integrated company where knowledge will be available in real time and at the fingertips of all.

Tim Sowell has more than 30 years’ experience designing automation products in Europe and then in the USA, combining the development and design of systems with application experience on large process and steel projects throughout the world. Tim was part of the core architecture team behind the ArchestrA technology foundational to the Invensys range of software and automation products.