“The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”
Alan Kay
by Ramón Salvador Fernández Orozco
Bracing for Impact
In the last days of professional activity before the holiday break in December of 2019, we witnessed with increasing concern how peers in Asia were already facing the profoundly severe human, sanitary, and economic consequences derived from an alarmingly contagious new respiratory infection.
Already immersed in mandatory confinements, they spoke in unfamiliar terms such as “social distancing,” “accumulated incidence,” or “sentinel models.” At the same time in Europe, our colleagues were profoundly concerned about the potential personal and professional impact.
January and early February of 2020 was a surreal time. We monitored how the impact of the pandemic was exponentially soaring in countries such as Italy and Spain and which best practices should be adopted to minimize the health risks associated with the disease. We worked to sustain the physical, mental, emotional and social health of our collaborators and families and to adapt our operations to a new reality. Most people were conducting their everyday activities in a business-as-usual fashion while we were consciously putting in place a series of preliminary new work standards supported by early guidelines from sanitary authorities abroad.
As a company devoted to providing highly specialized engineering consulting and strategic management mentoring for our customers (where NDE training, mentoring, and certification processes are core elements of the engineering support processes we provide), a close and continuous personal interaction at all levels within organizations is an essential part of our values and corporate culture; therefore, we clearly understood that we should be bracing for the profound impact that the pandemic could have on our people and in our operations.
A Massive Transformative Purpose for NDE Training, Mentoring, and Certification Processes
Purpose, vision, and action are essential to actively create the future. A massive transformative purpose (MTP), such as Space X’s “humans must become a multi-planetary species,” can be an important catalyst for digital transformation efforts. MTP statements should be huge and aspirational, clearly focused, unique to the organizations involved, aimed at radical transformation, and forward-looking, as a community. In the dawn of NDE 4.0, training and workforce reorientation play a central role in shaping the professional path of new talent, providing stability and developing opportunities for active practitioners, and contributing to preserving and transmitting the accumulated knowledge of experienced generations of nondestructive evaluation (NDE) practitioners.
Industry 4.0 is compelling in revising the roles of NDE practitioners, trainers, and mentors who are immersed not only in the dynamics of exponentially accelerated technological advancements but also in profound social, environmental, and cultural transformations. NDE itself is transitioning from a niche role as a quality control support instrument to an invaluable knowledge-generating process for creating value through substantial improvements in business sustainability, quality, and safety.
This profound transformation is shaping how Education 4.0 for Industry 4.0 will deliver disruptive modifications in education models, training processes, certification schemes, and support tools.
Figure 1a shows the process we have been following with customers immersed in Industry 4.0 deployment to expand and guide the path to specialization of NDE professionals certified under SNT-TC-1A and ISO 9712, based on the availability of a continuous professional development mentoring support; the reinforcement of hard, digital, soft, and management skills of the inspectors; and the availability of a series of supplementary endorsements based on the specific needs of their geographic region and industries where they participate.
Those endorsements, which contain STEM, quality management, and MIS competencies, constitute the backbone of a series of multidirectional development paths. From there, the focused NDE specialist can choose from a diverse palette of roles to explore, as is shown in Figure 1b.
For an expanded perspective of the digital transformation of training, mentoring, and certification processes, consult the articles and presentations included in the References section.
AI-Enhanced Interfaces for NDE Systems
The history of human progress runs parallel with a constant pursuit of augmenting and expanding innate human capacities. For centuries this quest has included the aspiration of creating artificial intelligent assistants, either embodied in physical objects or existing as mere software elements whose achievements have both advanced and challenged our perception of the notion of intelligence.
Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies are no longer distant, detached research efforts, but have become part of our everyday objects and experiences that contribute to shaping our professional, social, and personal environments, cultivating the technology-enabled collective intelligence.
NDE 4.0 will imply a profound reorientation of training and certification efforts, not only for NDE professionals but also for AI assistants with increasingly capable NDE competencies. It will also shape normalization efforts to guide an ordered and natural assimilation of those technologies.
Although many are concerned about the impact of AI-assisted flaw detection technologies, I am personally more profoundly excited about the possibilities of AI-enhanced interfaces to assist in the operation of NDE systems, including its use through enhanced reality interfaces, and deep learning language translations assistants to support the diffusion of NDE knowledge in several languages.
The Importance of Networks, Communities, and Platforms
Specialized NDE 4.0 communities are being formed around professional social networks, such as LinkedIn for the diverse community of NDE professionals, or focused in research aggregators such as ResearchGate. National NDE organizations such as ASNT, DGZfP, or ICNDT have created subcommittees and special interest groups involved actively in establishing NDE 4.0 collaboration, communication, and diffusion platforms and strategies.
The readers of this blog are welcome to participate actively in shaping the future of NDE 4.0 platforms development that can support enriched training, mentoring, and certification processes by participating in a global survey promoted by the ICNDT/ASNT Special Interest Group in NDE 4.0 by scanning the following QR Code, or accessing the link https://forms.gle/ECb2ThpwD6mkkpfT7.
Telepresence, Operations Scalability, and Digital DNA
On 17 March 17 2020, after over a month of intense preparations and developments, and two weeks before any sanitary contingency was declared in our region, we communicated to all our customers worldwide our revised collaboration standards where all the presential interactions were entirely substituted by telepresence process supported by a suite of different platforms. Internally, a reinforced MTP was established for our organization, centered on providing a clearer perspective to our staff and partners for the scope of our daily activity. This MTP is: “We focus our action on generating innovative frameworks, platforms and support ecosystems able to create solutions that empower our customers in their strategic choices that advance decisive outcomes for them by creating substantial value in projects that we are passionate about.”
Those two elements became essential to protect our staff and to address the massive operations increase in the following months derived from our telepresence capabilities, which allowed us to participate in training, mentoring, and certification initiatives in a more diverse set of geographic regions and industries. As one customer in the education sector told us in recent months, your company has had a digital DNA since day one, and that is why you were able not only to pivot your operations in a couple of weeks but also to profoundly transform your processes and reinforce your value proposition. To conclude, here is a reflection for our readers: How’s your organization’s digital DNA, and which steps can you take today to reinforce it?
Author
Ramón Salvador Fernández Orozco, President and CEO, Fercon Group, Zapopan, Jalisco, Mexico, ramon@fercon.group. He is a civil engineer with a degree from the Autonomous University of Guadalajara, and has a dual degree MBA with a specialization in strategic business management from Regis. He is a certified ASNT NDT Level III in RT, UT, MT, PT, VT, and LT.
References
- Fernandez Orozco, R.S., 2022, “Training and Workforce Reorientation,” in Handbook of Nondestructive Evaluation 4.0, Springer, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73206-6
- Fernandez Orozco, R.S., K. Hayes, and F. Gayosso, 2022, “Artificial Intelligence and NDE Competencies,” Handbook of Nondestructive Evaluation 4.0, Springer, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73206-6
- Fernandez Orozco, R., 2019, “Building Sustainable Business Models and Strategies Towards NDE 4.0,” ASNT 2019 Annual Conference presentation
- Fernandez Orozco, R., 2021, “Business and Personal Toolboxes in Action — Practical Examples of Redefining Business Models and Individual Skills for NDE 4.0,” ASNT 2021 Research Symposium presentation
- Fernandez Orozco, R., 2020, “The Human Side of Career Transitioning in the Threshold of Industry 4.0 Kick-off Steps and Support Tools for Career Transitioning,” ASNT 2020 Annual Conference presentation
- Fernandez Orozco, R., 2020, “Professional Reinvention is Not an Event but a Culture,” ASNT Pulse https://blog.asnt.org/professional-reinvention-is-not-an-event-but-a-culture/
For More Information on NDE 4.0
Make NDE 4.0 work for you! NDE 4.0: Let the Journey Begin presents the fundamentals of NDE 4.0 for researchers, developers, users, or service providers. It provides an outline for the development and profitable design of a working environment based on NDE 4.0 strategies that can be tailored to your individual needs. Adapted for ASNT with links to additional YouTube videos not in the original edition. (Product Code 10185-e; 212 pp)
Now available as an ebook in the ASNT Store: https://ebooks.asnt.org/1s8ivdm/
Print book available soon!
_______