On any given day, Dow Chemical has thousands of data points across its enterprise -- at a variety of sites around the globe -- that its leaders must access to make decisions and help drive improvements. For Debbie Rothe, technology leader of the Environmental Technology Center at Dow, the mission was to make this data more conspicuous.
That mission was accomplished, Rothe said, by focusing on European Middleware Initiative (EMI) dashboards.
"This is a tool we use at Dow to select only relevant data. Then we can add control limits so we understand when we are in control and when we're creeping out of control," Rothe said at the Intelligent Automation in Oil and Gas Summit held recently in Houston. "It allows for proactive decision making. This was our vision: to go across all environmental assets ⦠and we were 100-percent successful with that first deployment."
Rothe said her team looked at a variety of aspects of the plant, including the top 10 most commonly encountered problems.
"Previously, when the engineers were having problems at our wastewater plant, they would have to call the center plant production engineers and start asking questions: 'What's going on? Are you doing something out of the norm?' That can take all day if they don't get a return phone call," Rothe explained. "Now they can see [the problem on the dashboard] and make a very direct phone call and ask targeted questions to [find out] what's going on. You can also go in and get comments and preserve knowledge and information there."
Rothe noted a number of factors that contributed to the success of implementing the EMI dashboards.
"We met for more than a year, regularly talking with the plant. We had a data analytics team that really drove this," she said. "We already had this 'early adopter' mindset in the plant, and people were really excited about this new tool.
"We went where we were asked to show up and bring this. We already had good engagement between the experts at our technology center and in the plant."
Culture was also "on our side," Rothe said. "And our ability to influence was high. This tool filled a gap, so everything was biased in our favor."
Rothe expressed that as the project team went through dashboard training, they realized they "want this so much and see the value."
"That's our barrier point for our organizations: that awareness and desire stage," Rothe said.
ADKAR for the win
Using the acronym "ADKAR," Rothe identified five building blocks for successful change.
"There are tools you can use to look at your organization you are implementing your change with to determine what the barrier is," she said. "Then you focus your effort on overcoming that barrier."
Awareness of the need for change and the desire to participate and support the change are the first two building blocks, she explained.
"Then your knowledge of how to change and your ability to implement the change on a day-to-day basis are a little more on the technical side," she added. "There can be people components. If people don't have the time to successfully implement the change, you may struggle there."
Reinforcement to keep the change is the final building block, she said.
Rothe concluded by quoting the late scholar and organizational consultant Warren Bennis, who said, "Innovation -- any new idea -- by definition will not be accepted at first. It takes repeated attempts, endless demonstrations, monotonous rehearsals before innovation can be accepted and internalized by an organization. This requires courageous patience."