Industrial operations are
experiencing innovation and transformation in 2 aspects. There is a pervasive move to unify the
industrial enterprise over multiple sites with a more holistic view, and there
is a pervasive shift to using operational teams that spread across the sites,
centrally governed, where subject matter experts (SMEs) make use a timely and
dynamic decision support system in a dynamic operational world.
Using the recent discussions in
the MESA community about the recommendation to consider “behaviors” and
“systems” as separate, where “systems” help to achieve, sustain and improve
“behaviors,”there has been a revolution in manufacturing and operations Training
Systems. The major change is from a
single user, focused on his/her span of control with an isolated context of
process or machine control, to multiple users handling multiple processes or
machines, and handling more than just speeds and pressures – they contribute to
operations performance indicators such as quality and unit costs. The “contract” between the enterprise and the
operator has dramatically changed. In
addition, even the traditional narrow span of control isn’t sufficiently
effective when operators have never experienced a full start-up or one of the
more severe abnormal situations.
