Webinar – TCard case study

Webinar transcript:

Thank you very much for joining. Welcome to this TCard case study. Today we’re going to do a product showcase of a software solution called TCard and we are going to show how I implemented it in Glencore here in Australia. 

Let me introduce myself as your host. So my name is Andrew Yang and I’m a Process Engineer in the development team here at Mipac. Prior to working with Mipac, I was the Senior Process Engineer at the Glencore Copper Refinery in North Queensland in Australia. Prior to when I was at Glencore I provided technical support and leadership amongst other things to the operations teams to maximise profitability. Now I’m working here at Mipac and I’m helping to implement new features in TCard and also other exciting projects. 

So Mipac is a global company and it’s worked around the world and it’s deployed multiple solutions in many countries in its 20-plus-year history. We’ve provided solutions in automation digitalisation to help enable each decision-making and increase productivity performance and safety. Here on this map, you can see some of the companies we’ve worked with around the globe, many of you would be able to recognise very easily. You can see here there aren’t many regions that we haven’t worked with and had lots of success in. 

So today I’m going to showcase my experience working with TCard when it was introduced when I was working at the Copper refinery in Townsville. When I first started there we used a paper-based system when we were communicating with the operators, you know asking them to do certain tasks each day, make process changes and we would all enter it into the book. And as we entered it into the book, the control room operator, as they finished or completed the task, they will do a tick and that would be the way that we would communicate and know the tasks were done. In addition, there were multiple operational tasks, you know housekeeping, clean up, checks, sample taking, and they would just be assumed to be done. There was a kind of RAR but it was just there for reference there was no real way to know whether we were done or not. Now the reason for that was the operations team was made up of a lot of long-term operators. They’d been there between 7 and 15 years. However, some of them were coming closer to retirement age. You know, in once sense the operation could rely on these operators because they’ve been there for so long. They had a lot of site operational knowledge but it was quite difficult to onboard new people, to train them, and also some of our new starters were casual as well. There was no system in place besides the books to ensure that the jobs were done or to track them. And of course, cos we’re all human, periodically human factor mistakes were made. Things were forgotten. We’d have lapses in judgement, things like that. 

Ok, so what that meant is that we had a lot of productivity issues when tasks weren’t done. Sometimes ad hoc tasks came up on a night shift, on holidays, we made a phone call, got on the two-way and there was no real way to know whether they’d been done or not. And then jobs that weren’t done, if no one told anyone if it wasn’t handed over, we wouldn’t notice it until the shift after, but we might realise that a day after a week after, a month after and we started noticing them especially when an incident occurred. You look back and be like well that check should have been done and then we realised that it wasn’t. So it was quite difficult. And sometimes we just weren’t able to track the root cause either. To a certain extent, there was a lack of accountability for the everyday tasks that needed to be done because of the lack of visibility. If no one knew that the task wasn’t done some operators might have thought well does that mean I don’t really need to do the task because someone hasn’t noticed that I haven’t done housekeeping today. So when I was working partly as a supervisor working in the technical team you could really sum it up as you didn’t really know what you didn’t know. 

So Glencore introduced TCard by Mipac which I’m going to demonstrate for you today. I was a site champion or the superuser as they called it and I trained all the existing operators one by one and also other people in the technical team here. TCard is a management solution that enhances stability through teamwork structure. Ok, let’s start with the demo now. 

TCard is a web browser-based solution. You can see here that I’m on Microsoft Edge and I’ve got a URL and we can get a login screen in here. What that means is that TCard does not require any special software. You can use it on your computer, anything that has network access, you’re going to be able to access it. You can also see here that we also support different languages. So if you’re in a country that has operations in French, in Russian, we have automatic support. However, we can also discuss other languages if you want. 

The way I’m going to do this demo is I’m going to log in as the operator and show you TCard and what workers will see. Then I’m going to log out and log in as a superintendent who’s got higher access privileges. We’re going to create a task to show you and then we’re going to maybe log back in as an operator to finish off it all. 

Alright, so I’m going to sign in now as an operator. You can see the taskboard here. By the end of this demonstration, if you feel like you can understand this taskboard, you can understand TCard’s simplicity is its strength. This screen you see here with the top bar and the different coloured squares, this is what your operators are going to be seeing 95% of the time. So let me go through the screen and do some demonstrations for you. Here you can see where we have a title page, we have a feedback button which I’m going to explain soon, and we have the different data. Every time TCard refreshes it’s going to come up on the current day, however, operators can look at the tasks from yesterday and some tasks in the future. We have some different areas in here so we have up to six and within each of these areas we have these four different sections. So these ones are all completely customisable by you, you don’t require Mipac and you don’t require external help to change things. 

So here I’ve got crushing grinding auxiliaries. It could be pace plant, it could be section one, section two, it could be supervisor Bob, supervisor Marie, supervisor Eliza, however, you describe your plant and want to organise it, that’s how you can do it. You can see here, or you can’t actually see it at the moment but I am. It’s 11:00 in the morning now so we’re on a day shift so TCard is automatically here on a day shift. If I scroll down you can see the night shift tasks in here as the operator. If I wanted to see the night shift tasks I can collapse this and I can expand it when the night shift rolls over, which is customisable as well for your site. So if you could define night shift it’s 5:30pm, 6:00pm, 6:30pm for example. It’ll automatically go to here. You’ll also notice that we’ve got the different crews in here, so however you organise your crews, Mipac will be able to put it into TCard. So whether you have four crews, whether you have two crews, day shift and night shift, if your roster is one week on one week off, if it’s two days on, two days off, two nights on and two days off we’re going to be able to accommodate you. This is also really powerful for reporting, which I’ll show you as well. 

But let’s look at this as if we’re a worker. We’ve come in, we’ve had our pre-start meeting and these are the tasks that I need to do today. We’re in the grinding section and you notice here that we’ve got these different priorities here. What we’ve done is we’ve ordered it so that if there are some really important tasks that need to be done immediately, they come to the top of the board. Okay, straight away I know I need to have a look at the gearbox for SAG 2, so I’m going to click on it and it’s going to show some of the details. Here we’re going to see soon that they have the options for attachments. So when I was working there I would often attach safe working instructions or standard operating procedures reference documents to help the operators complete their tasks and anything that they needed to refer to. Here is a description. So here you can put in any words you might want to help the operator complete their tasks. And there’s different formatting and then we can complete the tasks. So my name’s Andrew, I’m going to say I’ve completed the task. I have the option to upload documents or photos, it’s mobile-friendly as well. So if your site allows mobile phones you can log on to TCard just with the URL, just in Safari or a web browser, and you can upload photos. If I’ve got a work request I can put this reference in here for reporting and I can put a comment in here, checked not too noisy today got a feedback request button. I’m not going to select it for this one, I’ll do it for the next one, but I’m just playing it out for you and I’m going to click submit. And as you can see here, it’s come up. It has now been completed. We can see it clearly in green here, which is good, and it’s come down to the very bottom of the screen which is excellent. 

Let’s complete another one. You can see here we’re going to have a look at hosing at the Cyclone underflow. We’ve got a little paperclip symbol and we’ve got a little picture symbol in here. So you can see some of these attachments. If I clicked on these it would open up a JPEG and you can have a look at the photos in the description. You can also include photos in here. You know, I often used it when I was like I need you to inspect this pump and you’d say I’m inspecting pump 31 and most operators would not but some would inspect the wrong one. It’d be like no no I’ve taken a photo, I’ve circled it, I would like you to have a look at this one please and that helps with communication, there’s no grey area, there’s no room for mistakes, it can be really clear. They can have a look and be like yeah that’s the one that you want me to have a look at. 

So we’re going to have a look at a scenario where tasks couldn’t be completed. So TCard is really strong with that. So let’s just say I actually can’t complete this task. I want to let everyone know I’m not going to just say that I’ve done everything, I actually can’t complete it. A reason code is going to come up in here. And this once again is customisable by you. I’m going to be able to show you how you can make it for how you like it. But I’m going to pick the reason for no access. So I’m going to say Cyclone was locked out by the shift electrician, no access. Request feedback so as an operator I’m going to say hey I need some help here I need someone to have a look because I can’t complete this task. So I’m going to tick this, click submit and it’s going to come up here. So suddenly it’s in Gray, it’s really obvious for everyone to see that hey something’s going on in here. So we displayed this on the TV monitor in the control room so we could show everyone what was happening. And we also sometimes show this down the front in the admin building as well, just to give everyone an idea of what was happening. So straight away it’s coming and saying I cannot complete. If I click back into it as an operator it’s got it here and someone has requested some feedback. So really that’s the strength of this, is what the operator is seeing. We’re providing them with a list of different tasks that needs to be completed. We’re giving them different resources where we can have attachments, we can have reference documents to help them complete their tasks and they can communicate to their supervisors, so the superintendent, but also between crews as well. So within their crew, they can let everyone know within their area on that shift that they’ve completed the task. And then if a task hasn’t been completed it’s going to let everyone know. Also if a task isn’t completed at all, say we just didn’t get around to recording the tank levels today, things were really busy you know we had a big spill, we had to do cleanup, that’s ok. TCard is going to then, depending on what settings you do, roll that over to the night shift and the night shift will be able to see hey, it wasn’t done on the day, but I’m letting you know so that it’ll help you complete your task, or they can complete it. 

What I’m going to do now is I’m going to log out as an operator and log in as a superintendent. I’m going to show you some of the extra features and then we’re also going to create a task. So you go to the top right here and you can sign out and sign in as superintendent. Now I’m here as a superintendent. Probably what you notice first and foremost is that the screen has not changed very much. What you do see here is with the taskboard this is the main screen. This is really what we’re going to see. So let’s say that I’m logged in as a superintendent, which has a higher access. I’m scanning to make sure everything’s going well. You know I’ve just had lunch, just want to check how the crews are going. Oh, I’ve seen here they can’t complete the task. Oh, that’s weird. You should be able to. Let me click into that, scroll here. You’ll notice some extra options in here as a superintendent, which I’ll go through soon. Here I can do some edits if I wanted to because I have higher access, But I can see Andro can’t complete it. No access. Well, that seems a bit strange. Oh wait, he’s said here locked out by the shift electrician, no access. And he’s actually requested some feedback. He wants some help in here. So what I am going to do. I’m going to, I have called the maintenance department, they will make access and click feedback complete. And we’re going to click submit. And what we’ve done here is we’ve closed the loop in here. So if the operator, you imagine the operator clicks back in here sometime during their shift. If they scroll down they can see the superintendent has addressed their concerts and that’s also indicated. You notice before there were all the diagonal lines, and now there isn’t. You know when I was working there we would always tell the workers you know you need to report things. You’re out there at the cold face of seeing things, if something sounds funny let us know, report it. But from an operator’s perspective, sometimes you know they report it and we’ll have to send an email or we’ll have to get contractors out to build scaffolding or it’s going through safety review and they feel like they’re reporting it. But nothing’s really happening. So then they’d come back in and be like well what’s the point in reporting things if nothing’s every going to get done. TCard has a really powerful feedback tool where we’re able to directly communicate with the operators, even if they’re out on site somewhere on the other side of the plant and they’re too busy doing their tasks. But then when they come back to TCard, they come back to complete their tasks on the computer, they can be like well someone’s addressed my concerns or someone’s seen my concerns so it validates them, which is really good. This feedback button is available to everyone as well and it’s an excellent summary. 

So you have a graph in here. This is up the last seven days. You can see here some tasks completed there and some reporting there. Let me go back to the home page. So let’s create a task now and I’ll show you the most powerful features. Also one of the things I’m going to be showing you is recurring tasks. So I click as a superintendent and I can manage a template. I’m going to create a new entry. I’m just going to create something. I’m just going to be like daily checks priority. I’m going to say that it’s important you know, it’s not normal, it’s not immediate but it’s quite important that we do these daily checks. I’m going to be putting this in the auxiliaries which is on the far right hand side of the page. We’re looking before the shift. I’m going to say this is a day shift one in the description. Here is where you can put a lot of body of text in here if you feel like you don’t have enough space to type everything out. In this one here you also have the power to do lots of Rich text formatting here. So I can create tables. I can insert an image or a file, I can do dot points, I can highlight, I can attach a link to different things, depending on how your site is done. Maybe you have an internal system like an internet and you could attach a link to the internet in here. So this is the test for daily test. I can also attach things as I mentioned previously for reporting, as well you can put the estimated hour it takes to do the task. Say it takes one hour to do checks. So checks is a space here where if you want more information from your workers. So for example you want their task to be done. They’re going to say check’s done, check’s not done. But what if you want more for them. Then an easy way that I found to do that is through a table that is like condition level one, and it’s forcing them to write something in here. So that’s one method that you could use. And that’s how text function can be used moving left to right recurrence. 

Ok, so this is probably the most powerful or one of the most powerful features of TCard. When I was working with the paper-based system, you know If I wanted something done once a week I would write it down once a week for the whole year. In sites that use Excel for a lot of things, as well as copying and pasting cells. And when the new year runs around, you’re creating a new tab and you’re copying and pasting the file and renaming things here in any recurrence that you can think of in your head. There’s a very high probability that we can do it in here. So let’s start here. I want this done every day on day shift. I’ll say for the next month and I only want it done on a Tuesday, or I only want it done on a Monday or Wednesday and Friday, you can do that. You could also say for an interval this happens every second day or this happens every second week on a Saturday. There are some examples here. Every month, every year block is also very useful as well. Depending on how your crew is set up, this gets done by a crew on their fourth-day shift, on their last day shift before they go home. So that’s a possibility as well. I’m going to make it a little bit easier today. Just for the demonstration purposes, I’m going to say it’s going to be done every day starting on the 6th and it’s going to appear of us overdue. Overdue is the power that we have to say well what happens if things aren’t done. 

One of the great things about TCard is it creates a culture of yes everyone’s accountable, yes there’s lots of visibility on tasks. So we’re really encouraged to do it because everyone’s going to see the taskboard and we’re going to see that red square and I don’t want people to think that I haven’t done the task. It’s a great tool for that. But more importantly than that. Pushing further with the guys I try to communicate is that if a task isn’t done because you didn’t have time for it, because you didn’t have access, that’s okay, but it’s important to let people know. It’s important to let the other supervisor know so the task can get done. Because the reason that we’re asking you to do things is because they’re important. If you weren’t able to do that density check that’s okay but hand it over to night shift, and night shift will do it for you. So here’s your overdue behaviour. The default is a stay overdue of an ex-recurrent. So say every Monday we do our checks. If it’s not done on the Monday shift it’s going to stay overdue. It’s going to happen on the Monday night shift. It’s going to come up on Tuesday until it’s done. Another example is if you don’t want to go overdue. So say you want someone to make a phone call. Call the gatehouse to let them know a delivery is coming at 4pm on a Tuesday. If you don’t make that phone call on the Tuesday in Tuesday morning well it doesn’t really make sense to make that phone call on Tuesday night or Wednesday because the delivery is already come and gone. So you can say not overdue, remain overdue for a duration. You want to say oh you know for five days let it appear on the task. We’re just going to go with a default. This is where you’re going to see how it’s going to appear on the taskboard here. So without having to go back to the taskboard, you can start looking through here and you can be like oh yeah it’s going to appear on Wednesday the 6th of March, which is when I’m presenting it, and it’s going to be on this crew, and it’s going to be day shift. So I’m going to press submit. And that’s one example of creating a task.

If I go back to the home page you’ll notice that it hasn’t appeared straight away. While we’re waiting for that to appear, I’m going to show you some of the other features that TCard has. 

Have you noticed that P2, priority two, here is a shutdown. So Mipac has developed a really useful shutdown tool. So when we go into shutdown what happens is that the tasks that are below priority normal and tasks that aren’t important, they’ll disappear. So we won’t show them, and we’ll hide them. The reasoning behind this is when we have a shutdown, things like daily checks and normal things like that, they’re really not that important because we’ve got a shutdown going on. So as a superintendent, I can go to the shutdowns and here you can see I’m able to create a shutdown. So if I wanted to I’d say a shutdown so go to the one we were in before, I can find it. Let’s say I wanted to start today, and I wanted to finish tomorrow. Now I click submit. I’m not going to do it for this one, but that’s how you create the shutdown in here. And then when you finish the shutdown you just click end shutdown. And that’s how you’re able to do that. Go back to home screen, it hasn’t appeared yet. That’s ok. 

Let’s show you insights. So insights is a reporting tool that Mipac have produced. Here you can see the 24-hour report. So this report is in a very similar format. There’s a daily email that comes with TCard. You can send this email to whoever you like. You don’t need Mipac to do this, you can do this yourself. And it sends it out at whatever time you want. So most often people will have this sent out right before the pre-start meeting, your safety meeting, your production meeting, and it’s a really amazing tool to give to the supervisor, superintendent or to the lead. Like what wasn’t done last night, what was done yesterday, you know very quickly you can see that two tasks were completed. You can scroll down, in a demonstration site it’s not completely filled out, but you can see all the tasks that weren’t completed. The crews, the shifts, the names, comments, and whether they required feedback, go by plant area. So if you have a whole site, if you’re the site manager or the superintendent and you’re looking at all these different areas, you can see here that we have all of these different areas. And you can be like oh writing inflation, that’s got a lot of stuff going on here. And then what you can do is you can drill down. So we’re going to click in here and you can see all of these different areas going down in here. And you have all of these different time periods. Scrolling down you can also look specifically just by day shift and also by night shift completion rate over a long period of time. Once again this is a demonstration so some of the tasks aren’t completed. If you’re having this on your site you probably want to have a completion rate close to 100%. But over a long period of time you can quickly look in here and be like oh we always take a dip in the summer or like oh yeah that was the shutdown period or, oh that person went on long service leave. That might be a reason why the task completion rate has gone down for a particular time. 

So TCard is quite powerful as well. You know when I was on-site, often one crew would say oh we get more tasks than everyone else or this one’s quite uneven. TCard is really powerful in that there is automatic reporting in here. You can break down all of your reports by crew and was actually useful for me as well cos I could be like oh I actually do give a little bit more tasks to one particular crew, I need to even it out. So this is a stacked graph and you can see all the different numbers here, you can just see how you’re doing over time, to do, expired, and done. Go back to the home page.     

Now we’re back to the home page. Here we can see the task that we created. We got the daily checks here. As you recall it’s got a P4 priority, for important. We click on it just to see what we’ve done. See we estimated to be taking one hour in length. We have a little description. This is a test task for daily checks as you recall. And we have the table here as well. Excellent, very good. 

Let’s show you the task list. So you’ll notice that when we did insights we had all of this prepopulated reporting. However, we know that many sites like to do their own custom reporting. And what we have in Mipac with TCard, we have the ability to export b CSV. So you can export this to Excel and you can transform this table however you like. So you can always filter as well by the different crews. So you only want to do a B crew report. Then this will show you all the reports for B crew for example. 

I’ll show you the file browser. So if you want to import files, this is where they live in the file browser TCard hierarchy. So this is how we organise our different sites as well. So you can very easily rename things and change things how you like it to suit how you would like your site shutdowns. 

Let’s go through settings. So you can change your logo. Here are the different titles. Here are the different reason codes. Before when we couldn’t complete a task, you can change these how you need it to be. And then the daily email lists as well. So you can write in here you put your different email entries. And If I click submit then it’s going to send the daily email to users. So once again you have the access and you have the power in the superintendent level to create your users. Lots of sites operated how they wanted. It’s completely customisable, whether you have one operator login or you give everyone their own particular login and you’re able to reset passwords as well. So I’ve got the operators, the supervisors, and the superintendents. If you have any issues you can email someone and contact Mipac, and you can also do it through TCard. 

Let’s go back to the home page. All right so that’s really what TCard is. If you feel like you can understand this, then this is the major, this is the bulk of the solution. So let me go back to the presentation. 

All right so I’m just going to sum up with some of the things that I noticed when I implemented TCard. So once again it encouraged a culture of accountability and visibility. You know everyone was encouraged to complete tasks but it was okay if they didn’t. And at the end of the day, we wanted to make sure that all of the tasks were completed. And if they weren’t that someone knew on another level if there were barriers, something that couldn’t be completed, we could escalate it to the right people, whether it be the supervisor or the next shift. It gave the operators an easy platform to give feedback on tasks. We were sometimes concerned about like technical arability, but as you can see here, TCard, one of its biggest strengths is its simplicity. So if they can use an Apple iPhone, you use an Android, they’re going to be able to TCard. And then automation of the recurring tasks as well. From the click of a finger, you’re going to be able to set your plant up and set the checks up however you like. Whether it’s once a week, the first Monday of the month, anyway that you can think that you need it to be. 

There were some unexpected outcomes as well. When I did it was very easy to train the operators. I found the old operators at a lot of sites would, we would have recruitment issues. As soon as you train someone up, three weeks training, then they leave and they go somewhere else, and then you have to keep on starting again, and you’re spending all of these resources just training people, just knowing they’re going to leave in six months time. With TCard, the training period is so much shorter because it’s such an easy-to-use program. Because it’s such an easy-to-use program you really didn’t have to invest a lot of resources in training because it’s quite intuitive to use. Hopefully, you can see that from the demonstration. We also got extra input from the operators as well because it was a good program to use. We got such good feedback they would often be telling me things like oh you need to be changing the tasks to be like this, I only see photos of this, it was really good, so we got some good engagement. One of the other ones which is really good as well. So the operator started telling me tasks that I didn’t know were actually done on-site, we like oh you should put it in here, about the filter clean on. You know twice a month be like I didn’t know that filter was clean, it’s like oh on the ID do the other crews don’t do it. It helps stop it from bogging down and that’s why when I went on long service leave last year, you had that indecent, so it’s really nice to be able to encourage feedback and get engagement from the teams. There was a new form of communicating as well. Once I left the office and on evenings and public holidays if I couldn’t get them on the phone, I could send them an email, look at the email, I could put it in TCard using the mobile version and I knew that would appear there. Sometimes as well if I knew they were in the field, if I just needed them to do a task that wasn’t just a simple two way radio call, then I knew I could put it on TCard and they’d eventually see. Eventually, they’d come back to their screen, that’d be a photo and description and they’d have the tools to be able to create the task without me having to make a phone call or trying to get them or reach them out the field. 

Key takeaways. 

So we had a lot of issues because of a paper-based system or a lack of a system. Some would argue although we had very experienced operators that we were getting close to retirement and then there was no system for completed jobs or incompleted jobs. There was also some issues with productivity losses as well, because we didn’t know when certain tasks were completed. When TCard was introduced to the site we were able to introduce a very simple-to-use application, and we gained visibility on tasks that weren’t complete. I was able to automate recurring tasks as well so that I wasn’t spending time writing things in a diary or doing things in Excel. And I found it very easy to train operators on a new system. If you want to ask more questions please feel free to have my LinkedIn profile, I’m also on there as well, and just send a message, and we can follow it up for you. Thank you very much.