Getting a team of 85 people to do anything is a challenge. To get such a large group to stop focusing on the technology needs at their site, as they had always been asked to do, and start focusing on the needs of the company on a global scale is a very unique challenge. It was this challenge that Barry MacGregor, global process automation manager at Dow Corning, was tasked with addressing.
Sharing his experience during the 2014 Manufacturing in America Symposium, hosted in March by Siemens and Electro-Matic in Detroit, MacGregor said the shift at Dow Corning started by “looking at where we wanted to be and writing a vision statement which became our guiding principle.”
The vision statement, created in 2009, revolved around a multi-year plan for what would become Dow Corning’s 85-person automation team comprised of employees from 23 different sites. MacGregor said that a key to maintaining a multi-year plan such as this requires the creation of activities for team members that change each year based on what we learn. Every year we revisit this multi-generational plan using Six Sigma processes to choose best-in-class automation technologies and keep a focus on the people who use these automation tools to do their work.”
Standards from groups such ANSI, EMMUA, IEC, IEEE, ISA, and UL are used to guide the direction of the automation team. “We also assure that career development, reward and recognition are associated with any of the changes made by this group,” MacGregor noted.
A subset of the automation team was selected specifically to manage automation standardization, MacGregor said, pointing out that this group is not “a formal engineering department driving standards. Instead it looks at best practices from all sites.”
In the five years since the initial development of the automation team idea at Dow Corning, the group has increased production capacity 25 percent by “adjusting how we change automation systems based on collective automation team knowledge,” MacGregor said. “This capacity expansion lead to an increase of $5 million in sales for the company and we’ve been able to document financial metrics for automated processes.”
MacGregor added that one of the other key steps taken by the group has been to standardize Dow Corning’s process automation on Siemens PCS 7 controllers.
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