Emerson Automation Experts

Emerson Automation Experts


Overcoming Self-Imposed Barriers to Operational Performance

February 14, 2019

Chris Hamlin

This FIRSTHAND: Operational Certainty in Pod podcast with Emerson's Chris Hamlin is a follow up to our 5 Questions for an Emerson Expert with Chris.

In this podcast, we explore Chris' thoughts on a presentation he gave recently at a conference in the Netherlands. The presentation highlighted the massive technological shifts occurring that are affecting the very way we organize our businesses and drive performance improvements.

We hope you'll enjoy this episode and will consider subscribing to the whole FIRSTHAND: Operational Certainty in Pod series on your iOS or Android mobile device.
https://www.emersonautomationexperts.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/Chris-Hamlin-FIRSTHAND-Podcast.mp3
Transcript
Jim: Hi, this is Jim Cahill and welcome to the FIRSTHAND Operational Certainty in a Pod podcast series. And today I'm joined by Chris Hamlin. Chris is a director for our Operational Certainty Consulting team and he's based in the U.K. Welcome, Chris.

Chris: Hi, Jim. It's great to be with you.

Jim: Now, I know you were, just before the holidays at the NexGen 2018 Conference in the Netherlands. I recall that your presentation had a fantastic title, "Tyranny, Heresy, and Confusion: The Job's Not Done." Tell us a little bit about your premise that organizations traditionally organize themselves to optimize performance against the most valuable or expensive constraints.

Chris: This idea of constraints is becoming more and more fashionable in terms of understanding how organizations work. And the idea...And it's actually something that kind of we as control and optimization engineers have understood for a long time. If you're trying to maximize the performance of a chemical plant, what you need to do is identify what's the most expensive constraint that exists on that plant. It's the place where the greatest value is, but it's also the most expensive thing to get rid of.

Very often, they'll be something like a big rotating machine. The big rotating machine is the size of these, and it is prohibitively expensive to get rid of it. So, what we do is as controls or optimizations engineers, we try and push as hard as we can against that limit, make sure that machine's working as hard as it can possibly work, for as long as it will possibly do it. And what we do is that we then organize everything else around the facility to make sure that that machine is exercised as hard as we possibly can. And we know that we do that the chemical plant makes as much chemical as it possibly can.

Now, organizations are exactly the same. In fact, all systems that have got some degree of optimization do exactly that. They look to see what was the biggest obstacle or barrier to them being more successful, whatever success means. And what they do is they then maximize their performance against that limit by organizing themselves to ensure they're always pushing against that to the greatest possible extent. So, in the case of organizations it may be, in fact, I think we may come on to those in a little while is very often around information and information flow. That's the most valuable, the most valuable thing that an organization possesses is the information and one of the critical things in terms of an organization being successful is the extent to which information can flow through it to support decision making.

So what we see is organizations forming themselves and structuring themselves to make the best use of the information that's available. And that's why we have HR departments because it optimizes their ability to use the HR-related information. It's why we have production departments and maintenance departments and legal departments because it's all around efficient, fast, effective use of that information. It's also why we all gather together in buildings called offices because one of the best ways histori...