Cost of Delay: Realtime Actionable Decisions Critical at all Layers in Industrial Operations

In a number of recent discussions with people when they have listened to sessions on the operational transform and the concepts of people and team transformation, they incorrectly feel the focus is only on the  “operator”. While the operator is the closest person to the “coal face” a fundamental concept of the operational transformation are the shifts to:

·         Actionable decisions performed as early as possible

·         Collaboration across the operational team in making the decision, and taking the action

·         Sharing of current situation and experience

·         Awareness of the situation as early as possible.

As seen in the diagram below if a situation is left then by the time it hits the weekly report even daily report the cost of the situation is significant.

Not all actions belong to the operator, some should be detected in control system, acted upon in that system, this is where apply some real time optimization tools is key like APC ( Advanced Process Control). Other actionable decisions may be on quality, safety issues or  maintenance issues that need to act upon early, and the escalation of the system should directly to the responsible role.

No longer is an alarming system good enough we need a intelligent notification system that brings awareness to responsible role, and immediate access on what ever device to the detail and ability to see situation and act.

The diagram below I talked about before but it continues to critical to understand that an alarm is “as is” situation, the cost of detection vs action is significant. The bottom axis is time, and the vertical axis is value/ cost. If we are able to move all roles to the “to be” state where decisions and actions are seen early and corrective best practice action is taken early.   

The cost of delay, unawareness is huge especially when cost is a measure of “operational continuity” and growing the production output. So when we talk about the Operational Transformation, the goal is to enable the operations to become more agile, and efficient, and this can only happen when business strategy / operational execution, and emergent situations are all acted upon is well “oiled real time machine” with each level role and application/ human acting in a timely manner, and consistent manner.