The End Result – Less than Optimal Performance
If your company is like most
companies, maintaining the performance of your production operation often seems
like a losing battle. Whether your goal is to increase productivity, or just do
more with less, you might consider yourself lucky if you can sustain the same
performance levels as last year, let alone achieve any kind of improvement.
The reasons vary from
company to company and industry to industry, but most organizations share some
common challenges:
- Automation systems are more complex and require extensive integration
- Systems are tightly linked to both software and hardware components
- Ever-changing business needs demand production flexibility and fast response
- Competitive pressures demand smaller margin for error, good consistency and quality
- Operational processes seem out of date and conflict with goals
- Degradation in performance and efficiency of aging systems and infrastructure
- Retiring and smaller workforce results in loss of experience, skills and productivity
- Pressure to reduce costs – do more with less
- Pressure to meet Safety, Regulatory and Environmental standards
- Operational – sustaining solution performance with changing business objectives and conditions, and everyday operational challenges
- Infrastructure – maintaining adequate training and staffing, alignment with other complementary infrastructure and solutions/tools
- Evolution – new business and technology initiatives resulting in obsolescence of existing solutions, keeping abreast of technology advancements
- Commitment – Inconsistent sponsorship by management resulting in insufficient budget to maintain or lack of monitoring to drive performance
Analysts
and operations executives agree that if you don’t at least sustain your current
level of performance, you’re bound to fall back, losing your competitive edge
and risking your business. In today’s fast-paced, technology-driven world, it’s
even harder to stay competitive while making sure that performance doesn’t
degrade. Operations must strive to sustain and improve operational performance
on an ongoing basis.
From
an operational perspective, sustaining performance means creating an
environment that at least keeps you where you are, with efforts focused on two
aspects:
- Support: The ability to apply resources to prevent and resolve issues, keeping the facility in an operational state
- Maintenance: An ongoing effort to ensure assets perform at intended targets at the lowest operating cost
Services
are a critical element in operational performance improvement, whether they are
performed by your staff, or external resources. Some examples of performance
improvement services include:
- Assessments and “Health Checks” to prioritize efforts for the biggest impact
- Planning and analysis to develop a longer-term path consistent with business goals
- Asset-specific tuning efforts such as Loop Tuning, Alarm Management, Boiler and Control System optimization
- Process optimization, including your manufacturing processes as well as workflow processes
- Resource augmentation with functional expertise, or extra hands for a specific period
- Training and Operator effectiveness efforts to improve productivity and expertise
These
all seem like good ideas, but where do you start? How can you move forward when
it seems to take all you’ve got sometimes to stay where you are? Check back to find out how. Source: Wonderware.com, White paper: Support –
A Competitive Weapon (Brian Courchesne)
Special
thanks to Brian Courchesne for the White paper: Support – A Competitive Weapon and the
contributions to this post.
No comments:
Post a Comment