Game changer

A key aspect of the ‘perfect plant’ is having the right information in the right place at the right time. In most manufacturing environments, instrumentation and monitoring is widespread. Pages and pages of graphs and reports describe every operational characteristic and are used by operators and management to steer the plant to optimal performance. However, in the modern plant, the right time to view this information is not when you are standing in front of an operator console. It is when you are in the field, in front of a failing piece of equipment or discussing a problem while on the move. More often than not, the right way to deliver information is by putting it in the hands of a mobile worker.

The right way to collect information must also involve mobility. Remember that 40 to 60% of equipment in plants and on shop floors is not instrumented. Optimising this critical aspect of plant performance depends on mobile field workers. Armed with the right tools, mobile workers can cost-effectively gather data from non-instrumented assets that can be readily analysed and integrated into existing back-end decision support systems. Bidirectional flow of information to and from mobile workers is a key competitive imperative required to make fully informed decisions.

Time to rethink mobility

The widespread adoption of smartphones that have the ability to deliver email, calendars, contact databases and web surfing has been both a blessing and a curse with respect to adoption of mobile solutions in manufacturing. While few now doubt the value of being able to check email on the road and other forms of mobile access, the paradigm used in consumer mobility is a nonstarter for manufacturing.

A business unit or organisational discipline that wanted to extend a desktop application to go paperless with mobile workers has driven initial adoption of mobile line of business solutions in manufacturing. In most cases, these deployments have been less than successful and have resulted in paving over current work processes instead of leveraging the right mobile platform to support step-change improvements in work processes. Simply moving an existing server or desktop-based application to a mobile device generally does little to improve the effectiveness of a mobile worker. Merely going paperless provides just a fragment of the potential value of mobility.

Mobile devices are not simply the equivalent of internet browsers; they are powerful computers in their own right with the ability to combine location information, automated data capture through radio-frequency identification (RFID), remote access to data and video with repositories of historical information and step-by-step guidance for how to perform tasks. All of these capabilities enable mobile devices to capture key events such as early signals of impending equipment failure or sub-optimal operating conditions, and makes sure that appropriate follow-up is performed to prevent expensive incidents further down the road.

Exploiting the power of mobile computing requires that the work processes involved be re-imagined and redesigned. The right way to think about mobility is as an invitation to a new way of working, a search for applications that can accelerate and sustain process improvements that transform your operations, not merely moderately improve them by moving the same process from paper to mobile device.

The pay-off

The impact from empowering and increasing productivity of mobile workers can be truly staggering in financial terms. For example, in process manufacturing industries, more than half of the maintenance costs are incurred when equipment is operated improperly (that is, outside of normal operating envelopes), which can have a significant impact on plant operating efficiencies.

Essentially, operations have more impact on the cost of maintenance than the maintenance department. Many plant audits show that about two-thirds of maintenance costs are caused by ‘bad actors’ that have been previously identified. Providing mobile workers with a tool that guides them with interactive best practices offers a low-risk and low-cost means to improve performance with respect to achieving higher operating efficiencies and lower maintenance costs. By providing a systematic way to capture remote data on stranded assets and enabling the mobile worker to take action in real time based on best practices while at the point of incident moves the company operations to a predictive maintenance approach based on actual condition monitoring.

This approach can free up critical resources that historically spend significant time on preventative maintenance inspections (whether the equipment needed it or not). An increase in operating efficiencies (0.5 to 2%) can represent millions annually in improved margins to a large plant. The corresponding 1 to 5% decrease in total maintenance costs can yield a six- or seven-figure cost savings.

The pay-off for improving support for mobile workers comes in a variety of other ways. Mobility turns field staff, previously off the radar when it comes to process optimisation, into a visible part of the designed processes of the enterprise, operating according to standard procedures with accountability and auditability. Management can push equipment strategies or business strategies out to this front-line workforce in near real time through procedures on demand and dynamic procedures sent to handheld computers.

Mobile technology

The functionality needed to best take advantage of mobile technology falls into the following five categories:

• Location and identification
• Rules and procedures
• Event recognition
• Contextual knowledge
• Collaborative transactions

Each of these areas provides a powerful set of capabilities for assembling specific solutions for mobile workers.

Location and identification

Location and identification functionality both automates the collection of information and provides an audit trail.

• Barcodes and RFID tags can be used to quickly establish the context for mobile workers when they approach a specific piece of equipment and can facilitate workflow.
• Scanning a barcode or sensing an RFID tag can assemble information from repositories on the device, on the tags, or from servers and enterprise applications. Such information improves audit trails and ensures that verification tasks were done while at the asset or process area.
• GPS adds to the ability to assemble relevant context and track activity.

Rules and procedures

Mobile technology for field workers should ideally provide step-by-step guidance to mobile workers as they address the tasks of capturing information and diagnosing problems. Each step in a procedure can be supplemented by additional information called ‘focused advice’, which describes the best way to perform a task. The system can provide historical information on processes or assets and run calculations when appropriate, including bidirectional communication with real-time systems. As the mobile worker captures information at the time of service, inspection, or observation, they are logically presented with interactive suggestions for process improvements according to approved best practices.

Event recognition

Improving visibility through rich and configurable systems for scheduling and reporting enables the activity of a mobile workforce to be analysed and optimised. The goal is not only to make the most efficient use of mobile workers’ time but also to make them intelligent participants in the larger operational and management processes in a plant.

When some important incident on a machine is noticed, it is possible for the mobile worker to take action directly through a focused advice message when appropriate. However, the systems also send information into configurable exception reports with decision support systems so that appropriate analysis and follow-up can be conducted.

Contextual knowledge

Improving performance of mobile workers is simply a matter of providing a larger collection of information that can be accessed while in the field. That information can range from step-by-step instructions, notes on past equipment behaviour, equipment and task documentation, video and other multimedia assets. With access to such contextual knowledge, mobile workers are able to make better decisions and learn on the job. Additional information such as schematics, detailed procedures and educational material can be delivered through attached documents or streaming video.

Collaborative transactions

Mobile devices can communicate with other systems in real time or asynchronously through means such as OPC, XML messages or web services. Such communication enables processes from other enterprise systems to be incorporated into the mobile worker’s tasks. Communication, invocation of functionality, monitoring and communication of data between mobile devices and equipment can also take place through such methods. Information on the device is synchronised with server-based repositories for integration with other decision support systems.

Implementing mainstream process improvements

Achieving and sustaining operational excellence

Operational excellence depends on optimising operating efficiency cost effectively while ensuring that the facilities fulfil health, safety and environment compliance requirements. Well-accepted conventional wisdom enables mobile field workers on the front line to play a huge role in achieving operational excellence as well as in achieving margins that lift the bottom line.

It is also generally agreed that achieving step-change improvement in fieldwork processes requires consistent execution of best practices. The key takeaway for exploiting mobile technology is that it is best employed as a framework for execution of best practices to support work process improvements that close the performance gaps that lead to step-change gains towards the organisation’s operational excellence goals.

Flexible scheduling

There is an important balance in inspecting equipment and process conditions in the field, a balance between the quality of the inspection and the frequency of the inspection based on the prior condition of the asset. Mobile technology provides a means to easily flex the schedule of inspections based on equipment status and business conditions while at the same time ensuring the proper type and degree of inspection according to predefined best practices.

Regulatory compliance

A discussion of operational excellence is not complete without addressing the importance of achieving cost-effective regulatory compliance. Auditability has never been more important. The same technology that empowers mobile field workers for operations and maintenance rounds also enables cost-effective regulatory compliance for process safety management.

Scanning RFID tags provides auditability that the inspection in question relates to this precise asset. Inspection data can be quickly gathered and merged into standard reporting formats without additional effort.

Ensuring a high-reliability organisation

Avoiding accidents and consistently and cost effectively running operations with minimal unplanned downtime - these are the hallmarks of high-reliability organisations (HRO). HRO includes concepts such as:

• Basic operator care
• Operator-driven reliability
• Reliability-centred maintenance
• Total productive maintenance

Using mobile technology, companies can help identify problems and respond to them before they cause disruptions or affect performance.

Prioritising maintenance

Another aspect of reducing maintenance costs is making maintenance more effective by ensuring that work is properly prioritised. Many companies have found that they can reduce their backlog of time-based preventative maintenance inspections, which usually require highly skilled maintenance technicians. Instead, operators can inspect their own process equipment and identify precursors to problems using condition-based observations according to predefined procedures and best practices. This concept, called operator-driven reliability, is a sweet spot for deploying mobile technology.

Addressing problems while they can be fixed can result in real cost savings and fewer equipment failures, as well as often eliminating the domino effect that leads to secondary equipment failures that result in unplanned downtime and slowdowns.

Enhancing asset responsiveness

Almost every manufacturing CEO, COO, and VP of Operations shares a common dream - increased agility. When their business conditions change, they wish that they could pull a lever and, immediately, every employee would have the new marching orders. Pull one lever to increase production during a boom. Pull another set of levers to optimise energy efficiency and reduce maintenance costs in a recession. More new government regulations? Pull a new lever to increase the frequency of inspections and data collection. Can it ever be that simple?

With mobile technology, it is easy to change the priorities and schedule the tasks and workload of the field workers to ensure that the business goals of the moment are better handled. You want more reliability rounds? Done. You want more environmental compliance rounds? You can have them, all within a context that ensures that the workload is balanced, based on known and available resources.

Leveraging mobile learning

Every week, expertise walks off the job. As the baby boomers retire, years of experience goes along with them. Using mobile technology, you capture the best practices of your most effective workers and spread that around the plant. In essence, by capturing this institutional knowledge and ensuring that best practices are followed through easy-to-use guided procedures and checklists, it’s like having your best workers training your less experienced workers.

Traditional training takes time out of the workday; mobile learning enables workers to engage with the types of training they need, when and where they need it, to assimilate new hires faster and reduce the impact of worker turnover.

Empowering the field worker of the future

From the shop floor to the top floor, automation has caused a revolution. Despite this, mobile field workers are often still running around with clipboards. By empowering these workers with tools that enable them to learn new skills, make suggestions and directly tie their activities to their KPIs, job satisfaction and effectiveness can be increased.

Furthermore, you can raise morale by noticing and rewarding effective workers when they catch a problem early on, saving the company substantial repair costs. Such workers can be recognised and rewarded, drawing attention to the success of the program and raising morale.

Improving project and asset life-cycle management

Every manufacturing company has projects. Some call them turnarounds, others call them outages, and all have new capital expansions of new units, lines or entire plants. All of these projects share a common problem; they are high risk if the planned time to implement is exceeded. So how does mobile computing help address this risk and reduce costs by reducing project schedules?

Mobile technology that can be integrated with project planning tools, the value being in the granularity of the data that can be captured in providing a more precise status of the task and job completions, enabling the planners to run planning optimisation software frequently and with greater accuracy.

Mobile workers can also utilise the tool to reduce wait time on permits and ensure best practices are followed and properly documented including the use of RFID tags to ensure proper identification, reduction in inventory losses and validation of task completion. Taking a day or more off a project schedule is the probable result, with the return from deploying the appropriate mobile technology easily cost justified.

by Charlie Mohrmann, VP Mobile Solutions, Invensys Operations Management