Six Fundamentals to Jumpstart More Successful Digital Transformations
Published on : Tuesday 30-11--0001
Beginning a digital transformation journey can be a critical starting point for driving better operational performance across the enterprise. As organisations begin to take the first steps – in many cases through centrally managed programs – management pays close attention to business results. Returns on investment (RoI) can be significant, with organisations making the commitment to improved operational performance seeing downtime reductions of up to 70 per cent and a 15 per cent margin advantage.
The move toward improved operational performance doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing endeavour that changes the entire plant culture overnight. For many plants, the key to achieving such reductions is through a well-planned, gradual series of positive RoI investments that add up over time. These changes drive momentum and benefits, and transform smaller, targeted projects into large-scale change. By starting small and leveraging six essential knowledges, organisations can invest in a portfolio of smaller projects that individually take small steps and collectively deliver high RoI during the digital transformation journey.
Know what success looks like
A key element of getting the most out of any new technology is approaching implementation with a clear plan that includes clearly defined, business-case-based KPIs to drive decisions surrounding new technology. A first, critical step is to perform a gap assessment and performance benchmarking analysis to find opportunities for improvement both on the plant floor and across the enterprise. With areas of improvement clearly defined, the implementation team can begin to design technology solutions – and the resulting projects – that show clear RoI, fostering organisational buy-in for the program as a whole.
Quality versus quantity
One common pitfall organisations experience when trying to improve operational performance is targeting common equipment. Often, organisations will pick assets that they have in large quantities for proofs-of-concept, assuming that more targets means results can be leveraged across many assets and large populations mean easy access to more data.
If the assets that the organisation has in large quantity are highly stable, they leave few opportunities to catch problems that will deliver RoI. Instead, the team should focus on assets that have clear, measurable performance impact. Problem assets are ideal candidates for such proofs-of-concept. Indicators from these assets such as safety, quality, energy consumption, production throughput, equipment downtime, response time, or a multitude of other KPIs can not only lead to performance improvement, but also help the team generate accurate data they can use to show the value of an initiative.
Know your starting point
Most plants have needs to be addressed, efficiencies that can be improved, or other business issues that keep production from peak performance. But just as importantly, all plants have systems in place that work as expected and contribute to efficiency and success on a day-to-day basis.
While it is easy to focus on one problem at a time when planning an initiative, such a strategy runs the risk of leaving an organisation overinvesting in each solution, often leading resources to be overwhelmed long before the operational benefits of any change begin to kick in.
An architecture gap assessment can be a very powerful tool for determining what data are needed, where to get them and how to manage their flow to the systems that turn them into information and action. Often, synergies exist between legacy systems that can be leveraged for efficient, targeted projects, but these synergies can go unnoticed unless a conscious effort is made to identify them.
Architecture gap assessments provide the tools a team needs to address the strengths and the shortcomings of the plant. Such an assessment helps the team with what is often the most difficult issue to solve: where to start. When a team knows the foundation upon which it is starting, it is much easier to develop targeted projects that create the needed infrastructure or leverage equipment and procedures that are already in place. The best initiatives aren’t entirely rip and replace – instead, they are carefully targeted to use new technology to make the most of what the plant already has.
Know your stakeholders
There is a simple answer to the question of, “which initiatives have the least success” – the ones that nobody knows about. While planned change in the plant is typically a good thing, it is important that everyone involved knows the change is coming and understands what the changes will be.
Resistance to standardisation and new technology can create conflict from the earliest stages of operational performance projects but do not have to. Identifying relevant stakeholders from the earliest stages of a project not only generates more buy-in from personnel across the enterprise but can also help avoid cases where misunderstandings or ignorance of corporate policy lead to delays and complications.
Plant personnel
Adding technology brings little value if nobody understands how to use it. If no one does anything differently, how can performance improve? Implementation teams can drive greater success when they clearly understand the knowledge and comfort level that plant personnel have with the technologies they will be installing. Moreover, taking the time to develop comprehensive training programs that teach how to use new tools, how to maintain them, and especially why it is good for the site and the individual is critical to helping build confidence in new systems and solutions.
Other business units
The reliability team is not the only group that develops policies and strategies with the best interests of the plant and enterprise in mind. IT, corporate leadership, safety teams and many more groups all contribute to making plants run as they should. It is not uncommon for projects to have elements that bleed over into other business units, so it is important to make sure that these units are aware and informed when any changes are to take place.
Not notifying another business unit such as IT can mean running afoul of that group’s corporate policies, which can delay, or in the worst cases, derail, new operational performance initiatives. Knowing whether these groups need to validate any new equipment or procedures can avoid significant delays and frustration.
Know your workflows
Successful operational performance projects come from identifying pains, and correctly identifying pains comes from clearly understanding workflows and related performance indicators. Before beginning a project for which the team hopes to demonstrate significant RoI, it is helpful to perform a workflow study to identify and catalogue the critical workflows the organisation currently uses, and how those workflows are interconnected with the technology that may be changing.
The information gathered from a workflow study can be used to identify needs and redundancy. This will help with deciding where to modify or develop new workflows and can provide opportunities to improve efficiency by eliminating unnecessary ones. Moreover, a workflow study can help to identify key personnel and develop rules and documentation that will help any program be more successful overall.
Know your trajectory
In a 2019 American Productivity and Quality Centre survey asking where organisations are on their digital transformation journeys, nearly 15 per cent of respondents are already on their second wave of digital projects. In addition, approximately 55 per cent of respondents have reached the point where they have developed a centrally managed portfolio of digital transformation projects.
Organisations are quickly realising that good digital transformation projects beget more projects, making it important to keep a perspective of interdependency in mind. This perspective is leading companies to follow a portfolio approach, where they pursue several interconnected projects at the same time. This helps avoid creating stranded investments that are ultimately ripped and replaced as digital transformation initiatives are scaled up. Starting with a portfolio approach from the earliest digital projects can deliver significant benefits down the road.
Know your technology works
Because it is important to show proof of success of projects to drive support for transformation programs, it can be beneficial to develop a clear, documentable validation process both to demonstrate RoI and to ensure process integrity. There are three common methods organisations typically use for validation:
Backwards validation
Reviewing historical data as part of a backwards validation process allows teams to confirm that new technologies are providing the information needed to support process improvement, for example, identifying failures they are designed to catch. By looking at records to identify problems that occurred in processes and equipment, and then cross-referencing that information with historical data from the maintenance solution to see that the problems were accurately identified, teams can proceed with confidence that the new solutions are able to deliver the anticipated improvements to operational performance.
Side-by-side validation
When using side-by-side validation, organisations keep old systems in place alongside new predictive maintenance technologies. Teams compare the anomalies detected by old systems with the reports of the new systems to ensure that the new systems are catching all (or, ideally, more) of the problems that the old reliability systems identify.
While side-by-side analysis offers a strong level of confidence that new systems are working properly, it should be designed with a timeline to ensure that old systems are eventually phased out to avoid the cost and time of running and monitoring two analysis systems.
Stress testing
Organisations that choose to stress test new systems deliberately induce failure-like conditions in non-critical processes and equipment to see if the new systems identify the failures. Stress testing offers reliable, controllable results, but is also the most invasive method of testing. It is frequently used in tandem with side-by-side or backwards validation.
While validation is an important method of reporting success and generating buy-in for operational performance initiatives, it is even more important as a method of identifying deviations from developed workflows and strategies that are key to success. The more committed an organisation is to performing comprehensive validation of new systems, the more likely the reliability team is to catch errors before they become a part of the plant or company culture.
New projects that improve operational performance are an investment in the plant’s future. By beginning with a clear vision that includes analysis projects, organisations can clearly see areas of improvement that will benefit from technologies that enhance operational performance. Implementing these projects focused on KPIs that demonstrate RoI delivers confidence both the operations team and management will need to feel comfortable scaling successful projects up into large-scale initiatives as part of the organisation’s overall digital transformation journey.
Captions
Pix1: A first, critical step is to perform a gap assessment and performance benchmarking analysis.
Pix2: Prescriptive analytics can be integrated with workflows to help an organisation identify operations problems with very little human oversight. Delivering those insights to stakeholders can help operations run more efficiently with fewer people.
Pix3: Starting small with targeted pilot programs based on research and workshopping of plant needs and values can build the foundation for future projects with even more significant business impact.
