Every executive wants the benefits of autonomous operations. The challenge is that most organizations try to transform everything at once, and that's where transformation efforts begin to stall.
In other words, the Operational Revolution of Industry 5.0 does not happen on its own. There’s no autonomous operations switch to flip and magically modernize organizations. Instead, the process demands a stepped and iterative approach. Beginning an OT transformation with small wins in areas like maintenance and EAM is both the precursor and the pathway to broader organizational transformation.
Whether transformation is driven by executive vision, operational necessity, or newly available funding, organizations often make the same mistake: they immediately focus on the end state. This leads to pulling too many levers and implementing too many parts of the transformation at the same time.
When this happens, it’s difficult to understand what variables are being changed and how to manage that change. The team is trying to dial in the technical system and bring an entire organization into the transformation at the same time, leading to too much change too quickly.
The antidote for “too much, too fast” is a pragmatic approach to implementing organizational transformation and dealing with internal change management. What does this look like? Figuring out the intermediary steps in the path to autonomous operations.
In operational technology areas like maintenance and production, supply chain, and material movement, this means looking for places ripe for small wins, figuring out how to inject automation into those wins, and then continuing to iterate on those wins.
Undergoing a wholesale, end-to-end autonomous predictive maintenance transformation is difficult, but breaking it down into what can be done and choosing three of these pieces to start with is manageable.
Start with three manageable improvements. Implement them one at a time, measure the operational impact, then identify how those improvements reinforce one another before expanding further. The idea is being able to see how the combined smaller transformations provide a larger impact than just the sum of the changes taken independently.
An example of this iterative approach in one area might begin with an asset refresh campaign. Step one is getting better at identifying end-of-life for out of support assets on the shop floor. This involves populating a list, and bringing in ServiceNow and Armis helps automate asset discovery, lifecycle visibility, and workflow orchestration.
Once accurate asset lifecycle data exists, procurement gains much earlier visibility into future replacement demand. That improves budgeting, capital planning, sourcing, and executive decision-making. What began as an asset visibility initiative becomes a broader operational planning capability.
Meeting the challenge involves looking at end-to-end lifecycle of assets, understanding where the most value comes from, and bringing transformation to those areas.
The transformation of this one area includes automating shop floor asset identification, creating a more holistic understanding of asset replacement relating to procurement and finance, and injecting change into the end-to-end asset refresh process.
Lessons learned in the grounded world of OT where things actually break and smoke provide a blueprint for transforming other organizational areas like Finance and HR.
Industrial organizations are centered around manufacturing operations, but the company includes many departments. The methodology of breaking things down into small, measurable bites when transforming manufacturing can be applied to finance, HR, and healthcare processes. Take the modern lean manufacturing discipline built around modern-day industry as the model and look at every single process in every organizational department.
This approach isn’t limited to departments within industrial organizations. The Operational Revolution blueprint can be applied to companies in completely different business sectors beyond manufacturing such as healthcare and financial services. The same principles of mapping out processes and understanding the end-to-end value chain can apply to any business.
Take, for example, a bank with a process for analyzing businesses for investment opportunities. The process includes many separate pieces and a lot of manual analysis. Bringing in a manufacturing methodology that breaks the process into manageable chunks and looks for the elements most able, or ready, to be automated is the transformation blueprint.
The idea is finding pieces of a process ready for automation, starting small, and iterating applies no matter the business sector. The first opportunities may not be adjacent. In a 20-step process, they could be steps one, six, and fifteen. What matters is proving value before trying to automate the entire workflow.
Breaking the transformation process down to a methodology that transcends a specific discipline like OT means it can be applied to any organization department or business vertical. It’s the methodology that’s important. And, from there, picking a software platform, technology platform, or technology stack that provides the flexibility to execute that transformation methodology.
Manufacturing has spent decades learning how to optimize complex systems. Those lessons don't stop at the factory floor. Taking those same principles and methodology and applying it to finance companies, HR companies, healthcare companies, and insurance companies, making them as efficient as possible, is important because the currency we deal with is time.
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