Improve Operator Effectiveness to Facilitate Effective Collaboration

Abstract

The paper reviews how traditional control room designs, automation & controls and operational practices have become obsolete. With demand and supply fluctuations in the region, operating teams often find it challenging to achieve organization goals and production targets. And although the control room infrastructure may go through upgrades, situational awareness often is not improved. Today's world is at haste to achieve results, frequently compromising quality. The truth is that there are unhappy stakeholders whose operating environment doesn't meet their expectations. Today, with advanced technology and human-factors engineering, control rooms can be better designed to improve operator effectiveness. In general, this enables various stakeholders to make better decisions, faster. This text reviews how operator effectiveness and collaboration is improved by carrying out interactive brain storming sessions to understand user requirements, manage competency, apply management of change, analyze complexity in various roles and evaluate human machine interface, console & control room designs. Benchmark studies expose the gaps and direct the user's attention to actions needed to achieve best results. In addition, the authors discuss how smart collaboration can be applied to prototype tests and virtual Factory Acceptance Tests. The authors note that middle-eastern culture for operator effectiveness and collaboration is a bit laid-back when compared to competitors in the global market. However, the outcome of the methods described in this paper, when applied to an organization driven by leadership, secured better results. This paper reviews similar methods adopted by organizations which experienced greater Return-On-Investment. Moreover, market fluctuations increase the need to optimize and standardize processes to aid faster and smarter collaboration.