Up Time Magazine - December 2008/January 2009 - (Page 9) lthough huge quantities of technology and intellectual property have been invested into the efficient and effective operation of industrial plants over the past century, many plants are still not operating to full potential. At least part of the reason for this has been the lack of focus on the value that the human assets can generate given a supportive, collaborative and empowering environment in which to perform. Mobilizing the valuable human assets to approach their full performance potential has been proven to result in a new operational paradigm which maximizes the business performance through all plant assets. This new paradigm is labeled “asset performance management”. A Dealing with Labor A considerable contributing factor in the engine that can drive toward effective asset performance management is a fundamental change in mindset and culture that is a holdover from the industrial revolution. Changing such a mindset requires that we first understand what it is and where it originated. As industrialization started to ramp up in North America and Western Europe, one resource that was abundant was people to work the plants and factories. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the available human resources were uneducated and unskilled. From the perspective of today’s culture it may be hard to re- late to how uneducated these people really were. Most could not read, write or do even basic arithmetic. This led to a huge industrial challenge – how to take advantage of such a resource. This challenge was met by Frederick Taylor, who developed an approach called Scientific Management, which focused on gaining maximum value from an uneducated workforce. In today’s vernacular, Scientific Management essentially turned people into minimally functional robots, each performing a well contained and well defined function within the context of the operation of the entire plant or factory. For example, a person may have been trained to watch a gauge and keep it in a certain range. When the needle moved out of the range, the worker would turn a hand valve in one direction. When the needle moved out of range in the other direction, he turned the valve in the other direction. This person might join the workforce of the factory at 16 years old and retire 50 years later having performed that contained task his entire career. This led to the concept of a labor force in industrial companies which was so unskilled that management believed it could not be trusted to perform duties beyond menial tasks. In essence, the laborers were almost treated as a kind of industrial slave. This view of the labor force was exacerbated with the introduction of automation technologies. In many cases, the automation technologies were developed to perform the same functions laborers had performed. For example, automatic controllers providing direct manipulation of control valves essentially were replacing the laborer who had previously been stationed at that valve. Early automation advancements may have allowed a single laborer to perform the scope of functionality that six or eight laborers had previously been doing. As computer-based automation systems were introduced, single operators may have been able to oversee functionality that www.uptimemagazine.com 9 http://www.uptimemagazine.com
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