The harsh price we are paying for COVID, it will serve as the bucket of cold water that motivates us to think differently.
Let us start with some imagination. Suppose you go to the plant and everything is normal. People in their day-to-day tasks, no one wears masks, and no one even talks about COVID-19, because it never existed.
As everything is normal, you go back to your office as Head of Maintenance or Plant Manager. You come back because your plant needs you on your usual desk, to receive the usual calls and emails, and then fix the usual problems.
Is this kind of game worth it in the economy proposed by the 21st century? No, and it is not COVID's fault.
In this imaginary world in which COVID did not exist, if there were still other facts that are as verifiable as the virus itself:
These many examples outline a clear picture: Latin America's industrial dynamics require less normality, and more disruption. While from a humanitarian point of view, COVID-19 is a catastrophe of incalculable humanitarian costs, perhaps that harsh price we are paying, it will serve as the bucket of cold water that motivates us to think differently.
And not because "COVID", but because we are long ago in arrears of integrating, in a determined and sufficient scale, new ideas in the way we think and decide on our industrial processes and our maintenance.
Today, there are already fully functional applications in various industries where the following scenarios are possible.
I do not quote this example anecdotally, nor as an introduction to a science fiction novel. I am referencing technological integrations that we have achieved in the real world with real technology, and that enable these benefits, as real as failures can be.
The industry's enemy is not COVID, simply because it is not acquired by the pump or compressor. If our industrial process had reliability analyses as a likely resource to manage the plant (resources have been available at least since 1978) if our signals were available on field sensors and then were historized (in the 80's); if we access in a timely manner some of the RAM Modeling and Simulation solutions (also available since the 1980s) and Artificial Intelligence (these are available since 2012); if we had done all this as Latin American industrial companies, recognized throughout the solar system as the companies that know their assets the most and that go to the forefront of industrial knowledge, then the management of a pandemic would already be given.
It would be a matter of sending to the minimum number of people, at the right time (estimated by our A.I. solution) to obtain maximum economic benefit (confirmed by our modeling and simulation systems).
It is clear how 'idealistic' this panorama looks, and of course it must look like this from the perspective of a professional belonging to a technology consumer ecosystem mostly developed elsewhere. That is precisely the perception to challenge in Latin America that we inhabit, because surely this same discourse within SpaceX sounds prehistoric.