What Services Does The Georgia Pacific Provide

In virtual session during Rockwell Automation'south ROK Live DX Strategists Briefing, engineering science executives at Georgia-Pacific explained how the visitor is changing the fashion its information engineering science (It) and operations applied science (OT) departments approach the deployment and use of new technologies and manage its loss of in-house expertise created by a retiring workforce.

At Georgia-Pacific, the company'south long-standing operating philosophy centered on operator expertise, significant operators carried the knowledge demand to practice their jobs and typically worked autonomously, making decisions on how machines ran. Only every bit these employees began to retire in greater numbers, the visitor had to change its approach.

According to Steve Clancey, senior vice president of Information technology and chief information officer at Georgia-Pacific, a central style the company ensured this shift worked was to put workers' process knowledge into a central location—known as the Collaboration Support Centre. This allows operators as well as external contractors to gain remote-access into the system to help guide overall operations, focus on early recognition of problems, and optimize operations across Georgia-Pacific's product sites.

"We feed massive amounts of data into this central location where we run models against the data to help us detect problems ahead of fourth dimension or tell us how to run the machine optimally and process that data back into the mill to help us brand the correct decision," said Clancey, who noted that the enhanced data menstruum enabled past the Collaboration Support Center has increased productivity past xxx%.

Clancey also noted the reality that some workers are better at their tasks than others, which was highlighted when operations data were centralized. "Some people were very good at it [their tasks] and others were OK at it; and you could see differences between shift A and shift B just because the person on one shift was better at making those decisions," he said. "At present we can pull that up to a level where it's standard, by passing on the best information to the manufacturing plant."

Before the implementation of the back up center, Clancey said Georgia-Pacific had a siloed approach between It and operations, leading the two departments to act independently of one another. However, the proliferation of IT and automation technologies, coupled with outside parties needing to connect to the procedure control network, along with the increased amount of information flowing between the IT and OT networks, forced a change in the way the company needed to view IT and OT moving forward, Clancey said.

"We kept laying all of this Information technology work on top of [process engineers]. We finally got to the signal where we realized that we could assistance each other out," said Clancey. "We could brand sure that the IT work was washed in a secure way, and we could gratuitous upwardly the process engineers to piece of work on more valuable activities, like making sure the factories continue to run and we're making quality production."

This change is role of a larger change to the visitor's engineering science ecosystem. These changes were designed with the help of the Information technology section to continue the system relatively flat, pregnant the cognition of one part of the organization wasn't siloed off from another, said Mike Carroll, senior vice president of innovation at Georgia-Pacific. "A large part of [the modify] was the ability to spread operational knowledge across a much broader range of the organisation, compared to how we had done it earlier," he said.

With this high book of technological modify occurring at Georgia-Pacific, Clancey noted they made certain all employees were kept on the same folio through twice-weekly scrum meetings where tasks are delegated and workflow is made clear.

Carroll stressed that these changes to the system have made an impact not only on the structure of the organization and how the staff gets work done, but how they view working at Georgia-Pacific.

"How Steve and I know we're successful, is when somebody asks, 'Who do you work for?' and their answer is, 'Well, it depends on the problem I'chiliad solving,'" said Carroll. "That'southward the kind of organization we're trying to build. Where, regardless of what your reporting structure is, we spread that [knowledge] capacity beyond [operator] capabilities and take them period to the problem."