Agility and Sustainability are Redefining Operational Excellence

Written by Michael Schwarz, MES/MOM Software Senior Product Marketing Manager, AVEVA and Joseph McMullen, Senior Marketing Manager, Value Chain Optimization, AVEVA

Digital systems implemented to improve operational efficiency also promote excellence in many ways beyond optimizing production and improving operational agility; they also help companies reduce resource consumption and waste.

Business globalization—along with the worldwide pandemic—have exacerbated the requirements for increased agility, resilience, productivity, and eco-sustainability needed to maintain competitiveness and grow businesses. In the current landscape of this great reset, companies must react and adapt faster than ever before to ride the wave of market rebound and maintain operational excellence.

Operational agility enables eco-sustainability and plugging of other leaks in the value chain, in support of improved Operational Efficiency.

Plugging Value Leaks

Each company’s operational excellence journey must address sustainable waste reduction as part of a complete solution. Reducing waste in industrial, economic, and ecological terms is not just a choice, but an imperative in today’s competitive environment. Such initiatives may be called ‘lean management’, ‘operational excellence’, ‘sustainability strategy’ or other similar names, but the end goals are similar.

It is already exceedingly difficult to manage both efficiency and operational agility, especially with distributed operations and a workforce generation shift. The key is to maintain and enhance practices for systematically reducing process and quality losses, while continuously improving operational effectiveness and productivity. Digital and Industry 4.0 technologies are required for enabling integrated, responsive and further optimized operations and for plugging any value leaks throughout the value chain. That is no small feat!

Eco Sustainability Commitments Redefine Operational Excellence

Eco-sustainability enhances the traditional operational excellence objectives with an additional target of reducing the company’s resource footprint. Sustainable operations consume less energy and water, reducing emissions and waste materials to minimize environmental impact and preserve natural resources. These efforts are in conjunction with optimizing value chain and plant operations to improve the operational performance, asset reliability, and quality compliance under more dynamic conditions.

Digital technologies enable a company workforce to optimize plant production processes while quickly and effectively establishing new operational measures for identifying improvement opportunities, both in the plant and at scale across a manufacturing network. Enterprise-wide visibility into operational key performance indicators (KPIs), insightful dashboards, and interactive reports enables new levels of team collaboration and shared best-practices across different functional domains.
Big data, advanced analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence augment human intelligence with machine intelligence to uncover hidden improvement opportunities and indicate optimal operating conditions.

AVEVA can help you accelerate the reduction of waste and elevate your operational efficiency across the business with a digital platform to connect your operations from edge to enterprise, whether you are in batch or discrete manufacturing, or continuous processing. This platform provides the data and application functionality needed to deploy consistent and organization-wide KPIs, reporting standards, and prescriptive and predictive analytics, in support of operational excellence.