The UK population is ageing. By 2020 nearly a third of the workforce will be over 50. And, as skilled plant floor operatives become greyer, manufacturers are faced with the challenge of preserving the knowledge they carry before they retire.
Employees can carry vast amounts of key experience, information and skills in their heads and that knowledge walks out of the door with them when they retire. Plants that are unprepared for that can be left with a challenging skills gap, scrambling to maintain their day-to-day operations.
The key to effective succession planning is knowledge transfer and in order to transfer knowledge you have to document and record it.
Wonderware System Platform 2017 can create a more agile workforce by introducing standardisation across your operations. Built like an operating system for industrial applications, System Platform 2017 is designed to enable enterprise-wide standardisation compliance across processes, functional teams and sites – preserving and recording your knowledge. Engineers do not have to learn how to use multiple systems, but can instead use the system’s common infrastructure to bring universal context to real-time processes, alarms, events and historical archived data across disparate business systems. Defined standards can be easily replicated, enabling simpler knowledge transfer.
System Platform 2017 also improves the user experience by delivering out-of-the-box content and process visualisation standards that greatly simplify the task of achieving optimal situational awareness of industrial processes. Out-of-the-box situational awareness graphics allow operators to react quickly and intuitively to adverse situations. In fact, it’s been proven that reaction times improve by an average of 40% when using situational awareness design methodology. Crucially, System Platform 2017 works with any device, making the SCADA solution more accessible to operators when they’re undertaking location-based on-the-job training.
If it’s the technical people that drive your business, you can’t afford to lose their knowledge and skills. Knowledge transfer is effectively risk management and those that don’t plan ahead will be left behind. The first step to take to safeguard your business is to standardise your processes… System Platform 2017 provides the perfect platform to put standardised procedures in place.
