By Gideon Malherbe, VCI Founding Partner
VCI has been pioneers in the innovation and digitization journey for our asset heavy clients worldwide. The way our world has changed in the last two to three years is more dramatic than ever. The systematic cultural and organizational shift necessary to keep up with digital changes goes right to the heart of how your company functions. It’s going to be uncomfortable for you and your team.
A big change globally is letting go of manual operating procedures and investing heavily in digital planning, scheduling and in-shift remote oversight and control because that’s where the value leaks happen. This is a drastic move for each and every miner, oil producer, utilities company or gas pipeline owner. But it’s clear from our digital intensity assessments that there is a correlation between digital deployment and reduction of variance in production. In other words, digital systems outperform analog operating systems.
In this new world, senior leaders have to know what they don’t know. Today, few executives could probably define the future state of their digital operating system like they could easily do during their mid-careers. The whole management operating system has shifted, and this is an ideal opportunity for senior leadership to engage in reverse mentoring—to make sure they have a true awareness about the potential of digitization as it unfolds around us in real time.
The entire craft of planning, scheduling and monitoring is changing, and management has an opportunity to lead and advise their workers in the moments when they allow full transparency and visualization of the operations. If we can do that, we’ll have no trouble keeping up with production demands and fluctuations. From this solid core of understanding and living the digitization journey, the organization can then expand its digital deployment to maintenance and supplier integration before tackling the rest of the functions.
It is amazing how fast digitization can be deployed once management changes their attitudes about change and our digital future.
