30 June 2009

Notification workflow software helps manufacturers move a step closer to zero downtime, says Derdack's managing director Matthes Derdack.

During uncertain economic times operational excellence becomes an even more important factor in retaining existing customers, staying competitive, cutting costs and reducing business risks. To a large extent operational excellence is based on business continuity, and the ultimate goal of business continuity is simply zero-downtime.

Researchers have described how Japanese companies gained a competitive edge by pioneering lean manufacturing methods. Another key area of lean manufacturing that turned companies like Toyota into super-manufacturers was their fanatical drive to achieve a ‘zero breakdown regime’ on production lines. IT systems for controlling production lines or managing just-in-time processes have become an integral part of contemporary factories. Accordingly, the struggle for 100 per cent uptime now also includes IT systems that have become the mission-critical backbone of many enterprise processes.

Systems for monitoring, managing and pre-emptively servicing business and manufacturing systems, assets and IT have been the focus of risk managers, CIOs and other responsible staff for some time now, and good progress has been made in developing capabilities for detecting critical events. The next move toward operational excellence and zero-downtime consists of software and services for automated event notifications, notification workflows and automation of problem resolution by means of technology and wireless communication, already offered by a few specialised vendors.

As humans are still the ultimate decision makers in unexpected situations, a key element of achieving zero downtime is the inclusion of people in the communication cycle in case a serious issue cannot be resolved without human intervention. For such cases, proper man-machine interfaces are essential. But having intuitive process management consoles is not sufficient. A comprehensive and reliable approach requires smart and super-fast communication solutions – for example, for submitting alerts and critical information to field personnel.

In a real-time business process, man-made decisions need to be made quickly. Automated communication cannot stop at the console screen indicating a problem by a blinking symbol. Such scenarios too often result in dispatchers manually dialling phone numbers to find a proper person for problem resolution. Having an unnecessary manual interaction in an otherwise fully automated chain can jeopardise the benefits of process automation as unnecessary human latencies become the bottleneck in the overall process.

In a real-time business process, man-made decisions need to be made quickly. Automated communication cannot stop at the console screen indicating a problem by a blinking symbol

Matthes Derdack, Derdack Automated notification workflow software can provide the required speed and guarantee the highest level of reliability. It leads to the removal of human latencies from communication chains, directly connecting responsible decision makers or technicians with machine and IT managing systems. Gartner calls this ‘communication-enabled business processes’.

These contemporary software systems deliver critical information based on presence of personnel; they choose the proper communication channel and work with predefined high-speed escalation chains. If they are based on closed-loop communication principles they also ensure the delivery of business-critical messages as they track the delivery of notifications and can automatically act in case of a failed delivery attempt – for example, by choosing a different communication channel or the next person in the notification chain. The closed-loop communication principle also involves feedback of the notification process back to the very system that initiated the communication chains, so it knows when a responsible person has been informed and acknowledged the problem.

As an example, Boehringer Ingelheim Netherlands recently invested in an automated notification workflow system which increased IT uptime and has already saved US$500,000 in lost staff productivity company-wide. The impact of such systems in the manufacturing business is usually a lot higher and grows with the cost of any downtime in a linear manner. The impact of automated notification systems is even higher still if, in addition to informing the service technicians responsible for solving the problem, the actual workers affected by the unexpected downtime of a business-critical system are included in the notification workflow.

A second aspect of automated notification systems is the important role of centralised notification systems for automated machine-to-person communication. Enterprises in all verticals have different monitoring and business process and equipment monitoring systems in place to assess the status of various parts of their infrastructure. Vendors of monitoring solutions naturally focus on detecting events, not on communicating them.

Today, some vendors of data mining, IT monitoring or manufacturing execution systems have added basic capabilities for notifying people, often following a ‘send-and-forget’ approach that is far from reliable. Many have implemented rudimentary features for one-way notifications via e-mail or text messages, without essential features like delivery tracking, automated processing of replies (such as a ‘busy’ response via SMS), communication escalation procedures (for example, using voice with text-to-speech if the SMS did not trigger a response from the notified person) and audit trailing.

Moreover, they lead to a zoo of multiple notification systems, which is difficult to manage and maintain and creates multiple-notification confusion among service workforce members. A ‘notification zoo’ actually endangers the very business continuity it was intended to increase. The ability to react quickly and efficiently to critical conditions is heavily impacted by the variety of monitoring and alerting applications that builds up over time with different sources, multiple notification formats, different reply paths, non-homogeneous communication media for alerts and so on.

With all business, facility, manufacturing and IT monitoring and management systems feeding into a central notification system, all alerts are handled in a structured way with clear responsibilities, employing two-way communication channels like SMS and voice using defined notification and resolution workflows.

Obviously, a suitable notification system must have the mechanisms and connectors to integrate with a variety of information and event sources in the enterprise, ranging from manufacturing systems (for example via OPC), facility and security management (via serial bus protocols and so on) and IT (preferably via SOAP or through specialised monitoring product connectors, for instance for Microsoft Operations Manager).

Boehringer Ingelheim France is a prominent and recent example of implementing a centralised hub to consolidate notification systems and resolve confusion. With a central hub at the heart of its monitoring infrastructure, the company has been able to increase uptime of its IT systems to more than 99.9 per cent.

Notification workflow software helps enterprises in their endeavour to achieve operational excellence and brings them another step closer to zero downtime.

This article first appeared in the Summer 2009 edition of Prime.

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