Trinity Technologies Corporation

Changing to Make Collaboration Work

By Joe Morray

After recently completing the third workshop with the Owner-Operator Forum in Baltimore, Maryland USA, I am convinced that IT-enabled collaboration is one of the key initiatives for plant owners to master.

There are many spokes in the wheel of the plant life cycle. At the hub of this wheel is the owner, who has assumed responsibility for the mission-critical function of making collaboration work for a plant. To create new plants and manage existing assets, the owner must set in place many relationships and convey many tools into working hands for implementation. A remarkable array of organizations, inside and outside, must successfully blend and coordinate for a facility to be economically and safely operated.

Paper has long been the common collaborative medium, whether documents have been sent through “snail mail” or through e-mail. Now, the Internet promises great advances for easier electronic transfers and purer collaboration. Today, the biggest visions are still hampered by the perceived limitations of bandwidth, security and incompatibility of software systems. These are roadblocks for the owner, who wants to cut costs by rapidly collaborating to serve the evolving needs of the plant throughout its life cycle.

Overcoming Limitations

The good news is that recent technological advances present more opportunities to maximize the financial and cycle-time returns that can result from better collaboration. What are the important steps to making collaboration truly pay off?

First, from the top management to the plant floor worker, everyone must be willing to change his or her way of thinking about how work is done and how information is shared. How we all think about our work may be more important than the technologies we put into place. We all need to invent ways to share the rewards, and take away the incentives to overprotect information.

For example, engineers have long been financially rewarded for innovation and analysis. Today, information technologies are designed to encourage reuse, negate the need to overanalyze, and make the thought processes accessible.

Second, every employee and manager must believe that the value of information is directly proportional to the number of times it is used. Gone are the days when data was used only one time for design and was accessible strictly through very expensive computers used by highly trained specialists. Companies want to reuse designs instead of reinventing on every project. They want to leverage the intellectual investments they have made in engineering and make the life cycle a series of stewardships instead of mass handoffs.