01 Strategy & Planning

During the pandemic, mental health became a topic of conversation more than ever. The actions taken by our employers can have a direct impact on our mental health. Asset management (AM) is growing in impact, but are the two connected? The session will review how good AM can improve mental health and how bad processes can damage employees’ mental health.

Asset decommissioning is a large and fast-growing business. However the full comprehension of the program terms for both cost and the complexity of this execution phase in an assets lifecycle is regularly misunderstood. This presentation will discuss the ways to find the right model for asset decommissioning. As the world moves quickly on the path to carbon neutrality, replacing our aging assets with a clean-energy option is a critical step towards the reduction of large (GHG) greenhouse gas producing assets. As a part of our enterprise mission throughout the world in all industrial sectors, the immediate "turn on the switch" to carbon neutral will be met with increasing challenges of supply and demand and our new race to the green planet. Now, seen as a corporate responsibility rather than a burden, our mission bears greater challenges than just reducing carbon, and poses another layer of complexity when deciding what, when and how to decommission while balancing significant capital investments to remain sustainable. If our current practices for our assets life-cycle; from design through to operational phase are without standardization, we then introduce greater technical challenges, economic cost and psycho-social challenges that affect our workforce retention during the end of the assets life. While we collectively align to combat our climate crisis, we also enter deeper into a "Throwaway" Society. World-wide decommissioning has become a "hot topic" as we see many assets reaching their end of life, while at the same time climate change takes center stage. As the increased public eye adds another layer of scrutiny over asset decommissioning, we need to create an efficient and effective program that will accept "green" decommissioning, supporting a circular economy through recycling and waste reduction, while looking towards ways to reuse existing assets for renewable energy transformation.

Join us for an opportunity to learn about what we must consider for asset management with new constraints to the supply chain. We will delve into shipping restrictions, budget changes and planning considerations. We will also touch on opportunities that have risen out of the learns from the past two years and moving forward with the risks in mind. 

Within the mining industry, the library of KPIs has not kept up with data that has become increasingly available through digitization, therefore leading to an overuse of lagging performance indicators. Additionally, due to the fact that strategic corporate goals are oftentimes built on the basis of soft or perceptual measures from stakeholders, which are subjective in nature, organizations struggle with the process of linking strategic level goals to KPIs on the shop floor. Therefore, creating a communication gap between technical teams and senior management. As a consequence, maintenance leaders have a difficult time demonstrating the added value that maintenance activities create with an organization, leading to challenges in securing the resources required for things such as continuous improvement projects. Considering that the implementation of a robust KPI framework is an alignment of three key areas: people, process, and technology, the first portion of this presentation will be investigating a holistic approach to developing maintenance KPIs that are integrated into corporate strategic goals. Therefore, outlining the steps required for organizational leaders to begin standardizing data gathering procedures and creating a trustworthy system that can be leveraged for decision making. Aside from the previously discussed administrative challenges associated with data gathering within organizations, it must also be highlighted that KPIs are collected on a monthly or quarterly basis, meaning that training sets for forecasting models are extremely limited. Therefore, in order to address the reliance on lagging performance indicators within maintenance departments, a variety of time series models capable of achieving high accuracy on small datasets will be discussed along with direct business applications. Through achieving these goals, the intended outcome is to create a more contemporary data driven methodology for selecting organizational KPIs, as well as directly demonstrating the added value that the various business units create within the organization.

Traditional asset management historically prioritized infrastructure over the natural environment. This approach has led to many conflicts between the natural and built environment (e.g., flooding, pipeline exposures, property loss, etc.). As we respond to these conflicts and experience new weather patterns related to climate change, the design approaches of the past are transitioning to techniques that re-frame water and natural systems as valuable assets. Natural systems provide value to communities through the provision of ecosystem services. The realm of ecosystem services is diverse and includes flood mitigation, mental well-being, wildlife habitat, and pollution control. Understanding these services and systems allows proponents to manage and maximize the value of their natural assets. This presentation will describe two types of approach for managing natural systems as assets. The natural system type used for this discussion will be surface water drainage systems (creeks, channels, rivers, or ditches). The first approach to management is using proactive planning around natural systems to prevent conflicts between watercourses and infrastructure from occurring in the future. The second approach is used to manage existing conflicts in and around watercourses when built infrastructure cannot be relocated according to the recommended planning measures. In this case, existing conflicts can be resolved through applying knowledge of natural system function and design. Examples will be used to explore how these approaches benefit communities and project proponents alike.

Recent developments in AI, ML and related techniques see wide adoption in many industries. However, in the asset management area, such technical advances are still in their infancy, especially in the maintenance, repair, and operations (MRO) area. Part of the reason is that, contrary to production, MRO data has its unique characteristics (e.g. incompleteness, inconsistency and heterogeneous), and most organizations are still planning to introduce diagnostic sensors dedicated to maintenance and equipment reliability. We face both challenges and opportunities in advancing data-driven continuous improvements within the asset management world. This presentation shares the findings of our current research and development focus. Titled “How to use historical data to find opportunities to improve the effectiveness of equipment reliability programs, optimize MRO inventory operations, and enhance MRO workflow management processes”, we will first examine the characteristics of MRO data as their uniqueness to a specific company, plant or equipment and their commonality across all sectors. Then we evaluate the feasibility of applying AI/ML techniques with MRO history for better operational efficiencies. We need to understand what data is related to human knowledge, human interaction and process, and what data is associated with the actual condition of the asset, and if there are patterns and models that can be learned. Last, we will demonstrate that AI/ML can find equipment agnostic models and patterns which help continuously improve MRO operations across different industries. Based on the findings, we will also show how AI/ML models learned from historical MRO data can be translated into prescribed actions for improvements in equipment reliability, MRO inventory and workflow operations for individual organizations.

Asset management focuses on adding value as a form of an investment in the physical preservation of the asset, financial stewardship, and data analytics. We will share experiences and best practices in evidence-based asset management that strengthens smart outcomes and strategies. Gain insights and knowledge of successful strategies to ascertain owner support

Asset Managers understand that the best way to achieve success with their strategy is to have executive sponsor support. Unfortunately, many Asset Managers are frustrated because they cannot get senior leadership to pay attention to the importance of the company's assets. Asset management goals and objectives should align with corporate strategies, but often, there is a disconnect. Some of the gaps are: •    Corporate strategy vs. asset management strategy; do you have a line of sight?•    What Asset Managers say vs. what executives hear; are you speaking the same language? •    Operations production targets vs. asset lifecycle value; do these conflict?•    Executive education; can you help senior leaders who don't know the difference between their assets and their asses?•    Executive decisions; are you in the loop on this secret process? •    Corporate performance vs. asset management measures; do your KPIs align?•    Managing up; are you providing executives solutions or problems?Understanding what executives are thinking and how they make decisions is crucial to an Asset Manager's success. Ron Bettin has spent many years guiding operational and project success by bridging the gap between executives and asset management. This presentation explores why executives often don't appear to care about critical assets and what Asset Managers can do about it 

Within our toolbox of best practices, the concept of Operational Readiness (OR) has been discussed, strategized, budgeted, and engaged, to prepare the asset(s) in transition from OEM to start-up, whether for the construction of a single asset such as a mine haul truck, or unique piece of manufacturing equipment, or for multiple assets within an infrastructure such as a hospital, or rail transit line to create the smoothest, "turn key" process for the newly acquired asset, prior to deployment into operations.Through the many global industries, we have been blessed with a very holistic view of what Operational Readiness should look like. However, the process can be seen as a high level strategy, which fails to incorporate the depth and breadth required to ensure all steps of the plan will engage tactics which align with corporate vision and mission, supporting critical aspects of readiness; the tracking platform, communications, and follow up methods used to ensure we engage stakeholders as "partners" in our journey, rather than captives in a process to ensure the asset is truly "Operationally Ready", before we sign off with the asset owners.As a result, tactics used are many time absence of an accurate tracking process to ensure the highest level of QA/QC. What better time to achieve this accuracy then at the inception of the new asset, just like we do when we welcome a new baby into our family. But can we honestly say we plan everything for our new addition? Definitely not.  We can agree, that we are not all aligned in how or what we will feed our child when they turn 2 years old, rather we commit to the short term plan and move forward.Why? Simply put, it takes a lot of effort to "sweat the small stuff", however the tactics used for Operational Readiness, it is critical we "sweat the small stuff" as we build a platform that will support the process, while focusing on reduction of the 7 + 1 types of waste, and by making the process simple and attractive to the ones responsible for getting the process steps completed in our journey.An OR report study from Deloitte (2012) revealed that if a company can achieve OR process effectively, they would have an opportunity to reduce the risk of loosing 30% of their capital value. In addition, the severe detrimental impact on Capex and initial operational capacity, ongoing operations and maintenance costs over an asset’s lifecycle are typically 1 – 2% higher, year-on-year and for the entire life of the asset, where operational readiness was not sufficiently achieved at the outset.  And then there is value add for safety and employee morale.Everyone’s best intentions are traditionally met with the reality of how many small, yet critical alignment steps there are to truly set up the asset to be resilient and sustainable within the lifecycle and within the desired Asset Management Landscape within your organization.Chaos usually rears its ugly head at a period after the asset has been commissioned and signed off with the asset owner. Normally the front end of design for reliability, need vs. want, master maintenance plans, parts and operations, maintenance and training strategies are set well.  However, are they truly measured by the organization, in a way that supports the quality of work to manage QA/QC performance and excellence of each process step?  Many stakeholders will have touch points in the process; either one time, or many times well past the commissioning stage, right to the end of asset life; retire, restore or renewal process, which is all part of the OR.  In this presentation for the Operational Readiness (OR) Global Approach to Asset Management Landscape & Best Practices, the information will address how Agnico Eagle Mining Ltd., has taken the opportunity within the Nunavut Division,  Asset Management group to enhance the tracking performance and following up with every stakeholder to ensure the actual work is being performed, at the right time, for the right reasons and the completion of each of the hundreds of secondary and tertiary steps are properly aligning with the timing to bring the asset into operational state.The presentation will discuss the practice and "out of the box" applications readily available using the Microsoft 365 suite of programs, such as SharePoint and the supporting applications available, without engaging in complex processes, spreadsheets or software tracking, workflow, and communication platforms.  It is challenging to keep everything tracked and packaged in one system available to everyone when having to apply multiple CMMS, EAM, ERP, or other 3rd party application systems help to support the management of assets. 

The energy landscape is shifting with the rise in electrification of transit and the rise of renewable energy shaping a new energy era that is changing the way we think about infrastructure decision making. This presentation will articulate how electrification of transit and an increase in renewables will impact medium and long-term infrastructure planning by providing examples and a practical perspective (case study) to demonstrate how Asset Management decision-making played a vital role in a utility company’s response to this change. This utility company is a key contributor to several electrification initiatives. They recognized the challenge associated with these initiatives and the overall success of the first implementation phase with minimal disruption to current operations. They are also preparing for electrification of the government transit’s first all-electric bus garage to support future procurements of battery-electric buses (eBuses) and will be working on the design and implementation of charging systems infrastructure across the city(?). Over the past 20 years, more than 50 renewable energy systems have been installed on City buildings and properties. In 2020, the city developed recommendations for the utility to achieve greater outcomes for energy efficiency, demand management, and renewable energy. The city also mandated installation of renewable energy systems on all buildings, where feasible, by 2020. The rate of development in electrification and technology in the transit sector is faster than implementation of major infrastructure developments; changes in demand patterns impact everything from the transmission and distribution networks to generation, dispatch and peak-load system capacity design; so it is not possible to “wait and see” before committing to infrastructure investment decisions. This presentation will cover how the utility is dealing with these changes by ensuring an appropriate long-term decision-making framework is in place to assure business continuity and reduce the impact on climate because it poses a particular risk for asset owners and operators. AMCL will present best practices for long-term decision-making and how the impact of change should be taken into account during the development of long-term infrastructure planning processes, in the context of a public utility.