The UnTapped White Paper | UnTapped Ops Tool

The White Paper Introduction

The Untapped Sustainable Operations platform was developed to deliver consistent and predictable business performance by providing leaders with real-time information, ensuring optimal decision making. We cannot imagine a world where doctors did not have X-rays to diagnose patients. Before the X ray, hospitals, and doctors, as stated in the article from “A Brief History of X-Rays in Hospitals” dated November 14, 2015, were flying blind.

Doctors spent more time guessing where bullets, shrapnel, coins, or broken bones were inside the body rather than diagnosing the problems. X-rays gave them a clear view, which allowed the removal of these objects with less damage to tissue and organs. X-rays also helped with diseases like tuberculosis. It is important to note that the X-ray technology did not replace medical professionals, it made them more effective and improved overall medical care. The UnTapped Sustainable Operations platform and technology is the X-ray which will provide leaders with the insight to transform the health of their businesses.

Our technology platform is essential for businesses who understand that establishing essential controls is critical for the overall health of a business because it allows leaders to focus on weak signals rather than respond to major risks. Leaders should be alerted to potential problems that could potentially cause adverse impacts and negative results so that solutions can be implemented proactively vs reactively.

If you answered “NO” to any of the following questions below, then the UnTapped technology platform will help you.

• Do you know if all or most of your employees follow the procedures that protect your organization from risk?

• Do you trust that the crucial factors and work processes keep your assets, reliability, and safety intact?

• Do you track the impact of changes on your operating system?

• Do you have a clear knowledge that ensures consistent and predictable operation or do you accept process instability and management system weakness as normal?.

Learn More, The Argument

The What & Why Behind
UnTapped Sustainable Operations

What UnTapped technology will do and why it is important for you

It is extremely hard to keep track of all the changing factors in a complex external environment without using technology. This is why leaders are often unprepared when weak signals lead to negative consequences. It also makes it hard to always fulfill shareholder expectations with all the different demands and resource limitations. Adapting to changing factors creates a reactive culture which increases the risk of safety incidents, environmental incidents, reliability incidents, and productivity loss.

There have been some notable improvements using big data, but leaders are flooded with data that does not show a clear story that can be used to anticipate outcomes. Many organizations use internal resources, external consultants, and assurance protocols to understand the data so they can stabilize and improve their business performance. Millions of dollars spent, and countless employee hours, have not ended this cycle of trying to understand and deliver optimal decision making that drives sustained business performance and stable operations.

A healthy business foundation ensures regulatory compliance, ethical business practices, and brand integrity. Having a solid foundation depends on healthy work processes that need human intervention because everything deteriorates over time as a natural order. More specifically:

• People require training to stay current.

• Equipment requires inspection and maintenance to run efficiently.

• Product quality should be validated before selling to customers.

• New employees need to be hired due to normal attrition and retirement.

Commitment statements, policies, standards, and protocols are the result of a lot of time and resources spent by many companies. Currently compliance depends on static two-dimensional systems like audits and assessments. These systems have inherent limitations because they try to forecast future results based on snapshots. In other words, internal meetings, management reviews, dashboards, audits, and internal assessments are the tools that leaders use to evaluate business performance. These tools, which worked well in the past, have many drawbacks.

It also needs a culture of psychological safety where non operational leaders can give objective views of business performance without political consequences. Building a technology system that measures current performance against business standards will help make sure that the basic elements of the business are maintained. To improve these systems, the human factors must be taken out of the equation, which means that a technological solution is required.

Technology such as AI will be able to compare real time business performance to standards, best practices, and regulations thus generating weak signals. These weak signals could then be compared to similar historical practices to predict potential outcomes. Transparency means not only seeing data or information, but also connecting this data to critical operating ranges or past events so that leaders can tell if the weak signals could result in negative outcomes. They need to know how to act fast and effectively to lower risk and change course. This requires working together with the business operators and functional experts.

Timing is essential and resource management is especially important. The leader should then use this information to make necessary course corrections in a more methodical manner reducing the need for reactive problem solving and firefighting. This information can be escalated to more senior management, so they have a clear picture of the health of their business. This will create a culture of accountability. Providing the right information to the right leaders will help avoid business disruption because problems will be resolved in a systematic way while optimizing limited resources. Giving leaders objective support helps them make good decisions that will ensure regulatory compliance, brand reputation, and shareholder confidence.

Technology providers are trying to combine data from different computer systems to detect anomalies. This is an extremely expensive and complicated process that does not seem attractive for most industry leaders. There are some technology providers who successfully monitor and report risks by gathering incidents, root cause investigation data, and audit results. They use this data to analyze and predict future outcomes. These systems have been effective in finding easy problems but do not find weak signals that come from work process deviations or ineffective/obsolete work processes.

Using a deterministic or behavior-based AI tool will avoid the need to connect all the data from current systems such as SAP and control systems which can prove to be very time consuming, resource intensive, and costly. This technology and the UnTapped platform can provide the necessary transparency for leaders that help them to fully understand the health of their business. Per Google definition:

“A deterministic AI system operates under the principle that every set of conditions will always lead to the same outcome. This is the basis of traditional programming and algorithms, where the same input will always produce the same output.” Using deterministic AI with the UnTapped Sustainable Operations platform will help leaders determine when their businesses are drifting from those standards and norms that have proven to maintain stability."

Therefore, it is crucial to build upon historical work practices and leverage technology to ensure workplace stability. The UnTapped Sustainable Operations Technology platform is the next evolution of business management that helps leaders focus on root causes versus responding to symptoms as seen on the diagram presented below.

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The Argument for
UnTapped Sustainable Operations

Why UnTapped Sustainable Operations?

Many influential leaders set up safeguards to ensure that business performance operates in accordance with established baseline parameters. These safeguards represent critical resources, policies, procedures, and work processes that prevent their businesses from facing high-risk events (i.e., personal safety, environmental performance, reliability incidents, product quality events, and/or productivity loss.) These leaders also use dashboards, operating trends, and input from functional experts to assess the health of their businesses. Unfortunately, this approach has many drawbacks such as human bias, irrelevant historical patterns, and filtering of critical information. As a result, leaders do not have confidence that weak signals truly represent performance gaps that could result in negative consequences.

This white paper asserts that leadership effectiveness requires an innovative approach. Great leaders still need vision, influence, and integrity, but they also need resilience, transparent communication, innovation, and decisiveness based on a realistic view of the current situation. Technology can help leaders see problems better, like the X-Ray technology did for doctors. This will allow leaders to act on weak signals, rather than wait for risks and incidents to materialize causing reactivity and firefighting.

It is essential for leaders to make sure that their policies and procedures are followed, because this is the basis of their business and helps them manage their overall risk profile. If they cannot ensure such control, they expose themselves to significant risks in areas such as safety, environmental performance, productivity, and product quality. Managing corporate risk is even harder by the unpredictability of the external environment, including factors such as climate change, political instability, supply chain variability, and globalization. Many businesses are ineffective at coping with these changes because leaders do not have a complete knowledge of their baseline performance. Therefore, they respond to these changes by forcing their organizations into a daily crisis mode.

Compliance with policies and standards is also essential for regulatory, brand, ethical, and competitive reasons. However, currently compliance depends on leadership and assurance practices that prove to be fallible. These practices cannot ensure uniformity in the aspects of reliability, productivity, and product quality because audits focus on a snapshot in time. Leaders cannot observe everything correctly even with the best KPI’s because many of the documented work processes do not adequately represent their interdependencies. Therefore, if policies, procedures, and work processes are not followed and checked in the field, they quickly become outdated. This creates a discrepancy between what senior executives say and do, leading them to give a false impression to shareholders and customers and creating a lack of trust in leadership capability.

Better policies, leadership, or audits are not enough to solve this problem. They might help in the short term, but they will not last without a culture of accountability and transparency from the bottom to the top. Leaders need to know real facts and not rely on intuition. They need to see when their business are falling behind in real time. They need to act fast and not make decisions and changes based on symptoms. Manual or vertical solutions will not work. However advanced technology like artificial Intelligence can help leaders gain more transparency so they can solve problems before they result in risks that create safety, environmental, reliability, productivity, and product quality issues.

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What & Why

The Argument

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