The Control Room – Next Generation of Managers

Computing horsepower has increased tremendously over the years. I was at NASA Houston recently, and was amazed to see how little technology was used to put the first man on the moon. I was informed that the entire operation was controlled by the horse power equivalent to 3 PC’s. The amount of copper to lay the wiring was equivalent to the length of going around the earth almost 3 times.

Not sure how to interpret the decision – If 3 pc’s can put a man on the moon then do we really need all that extra memories to run a factory. A typical manufacturing factory will have at least 10 – 20 servers with memory ranging from 2 - 10 GB of RAM.

If we target the main thrust of change over the years, it has been the transformation of information sharing. One of my clients claimed that it would take 3 - 4 weeks to get a report for the entire spend in the organization. This induces latency in the decision making process and reduces the flexibility of the company to react to changes quickly.
The main thrust of technology is not only helping in solving complex problems but the dissemination of gigabytes of information quickly and in real time to enable fast decision making. To enable such massive amount of data flowing between equipment, operations, maintenance, engineering and corporate it requires substantial bandwidth and RAM to process and distribute the information to the stakeholders.

The role of “Autonomation” – which is the inclusion of human intelligence in operations – will become an important aspect of manufacturing. Toyota developed the technique of self-correcting operations where the operation would stop automatically when a defect is detected. This process allows management of multiple machines by fewer people. The role of technology to enable operations to be automated is also related to processing of information. The real time status of the equipment including capturing the signals from active and passive sensors and processing them intelligently to a digestible metric enhances the ability of the company to manage the company with fewer individuals on the floor.

The classic example is Wall-Street. The value of currency is changing by the second depending on multitude of factors from around the world. The currency valuations are available real-time to everyone and decisions on buy & sell are almost real-time, even by a common person sitting in a remote place – while sipping margarita in Cancun. If Wall-Street can do it, so can manufacturing companies. I see the next generation of manufacturing managers sitting in a Control Room – making decisions based on the real-time feedback from the operation. The decisions will be implemented and the results will be visible real-time for the next set of corrective actions.