Industry Visionaries
Automation systems have been measuring operational process variables (temperatures, pressure, speed) in real time for years. But
business systems have traditionally relied on a calendar-based, usually monthly, schedule.
With industrial business variables such as energy and material costs fluctuating dynamically, just optimizing the efficiency of operations is no longer sufficient to maximize profitability.
Traditional continuous improvement (CI) approaches for industrial operations have targeted management and professional staff in team-based problem-solving processes. However, these processes often fail to resolve a large number of minor root causes, which in aggregate significantly limit performance.
Attaining operations excellence has been a primary objective of leading industrial companies for decades. As with so many slogans in use today, most industrial professionals would not definitively identify an operationally excellent organization if they saw one. The reason is that “operations excellence” is not very well defined.
Real Time Operational Excellence provides a fairly simple top-down analysis and bottom-up implementation approach which makes it fairly easy for organizations to engage and execute. It also is executed as a series of four phases, with the first three phases done as a sequence and the fourth as a Continuous Improvement process based on Theory of Constraints analysis.
The emergence of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) allows many traditional notions associated with industrial automation systems to be reconsidered. One of the traditional constructs requiring a new perspective is the topology of industrial automation systems.
