1.1 Requirements & Expectations

Increased extreme weather phenomenon - intense forest fires, heavy rain, severe flooding, and record high temperatures continues to be a concern worldwide, causing disruptions and affecting people and critical assets. This panel focuses on how industries and governments prepare for climate resiliency and adaptation.

The keynote will look at engagement in the topic of Asset Management with leaders within Manitoba Hydro, describe how at Manitoba Hydro we are continuing and expanding the conversation on Asset Management, and some feedback received on Manitoba Hydro’s Asset Management. It will also touch on an Asset Management system approach.

As maintainers, we know there is a lot of value in what we do. Without our work, plant, and equipment will soon stop and our companies will then go out of business. What we do impacts safety, health, revenues, costs, and company reputation. A dirty little truth about maintenance is that it is only we who work in it, that really know the value of what we do – or do we? We do know our value in qualitative terms, but can we quantify it? Most maintenance can be improved and we know it. We can do things more efficiently, and we can keep things running more reliably. We often know how to do that, but when we want to make those improvements there is no money for them. Why? Most business people know very little about what we do and how it impacts their business. They see maintenance as a repair shop. We fix what breaks. And they know little, or nothing, more. They may know that maintenance represents a significant cost, and they may even know that they can’t get away with cutting it too much. But they do not know the full value of what maintenance can deliver, nor what it takes to deliver it. If you want to make improvements you need a decision-maker, someone with executive-level authority, to back you up. To get that, you will need to explain what value you can deliver, and in terms they can understand. You will need to show them the savings that are possible from doing things more efficiently, and the added revenues that can arise from investment in defining the right work. You will also need to show them how their support is needed to bring operators and the supply chain into the team with you to make those changes happen so that benefits are fully realized. Quantifying value and being simple in how you say it matters.

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.

Presentation highlights the importance and interdependency of three pillars of success (people, processes, and technology) and Cameco’s asset management improvement efforts through each of these, including lessons learned. Audience will learn about the importance of organizational change management, business process management and agile methodologies, some of the technologies supporting asset maintenance and reliability, and its new Asset Management & Reliability Center of Excellence.

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.

Our collective goals are to operate and maintain the facility in a safe, compliant, effective, and socially responsible manner to sustain a 100% commercial availability. There is no greater impact to these goals than the people directly responsible for the Operation and Maintenance at the Facilities. These goals are met through a combination of strategies that involve a myriad of challenging communications. More than anything, these communications require a complimentary skillset not necessarily honed by todays skilled craftsmen, soft skills. They may take the form of questioning the status quo, holding each other accountable, or courageous conversations. Essentially, we want teams who will listen and understand the facts of the whole situation at hand, and work together to elevate to the occasion, thereby addressing the failure or opportunities for improvements to the absolute best of their collaborative abilities. In addition to having the Technical skillset to operate and maintain our critical assets, our high functioning Teams need to contribute and extrapolate their soft skills by:-    Creating a psychologically safe space to work to collaborate and challenge -    Know, understand, believe the facts, then Act -    Fostering an Environmental & Safety conscious workplace -    Empowering each other, challenging the status quo and continuous improvement Teams that can leverage these 4 key strategies are able to rise to greatness at the most critical moments and inspire each other to do their very best work. As such, the focus of this MMP Capstone will be the strategic investment and development of our Teams’ communications skillset.  We will explore the many communications related failures that I have personally experienced and dissect individually the cost of each such failure, thereby quantifying the cost of poorly managed communications and, the cost benefit to investing in our greatest asset; Our People. 

Maple Leaf Foods has embarked on a journey to be the most sustainable protein company on earth with a mandate to relentlessly eliminate waste and improve efficiency. As the World’s First Major Carbon Neutral Food Company, the company is undergoing a cultural, operational, and digital transformation in various functions including Asset Management, Reliability, and Maintenance. The keynotes provide insights into how Strategic and Behaviour-Based Asset Management enables Environmental Sustainability to raise the good in food at Maple Leaf Foods.

Presenting Tactical Asset Management deployment and case study overviews implemented at the Regional Municipality of Halton, Water and Wastewater Treatment Division. Demonstrating how collaboration between Maintenance, Operations and Capital can effectively optimize asset value and promote innovation to how municipalities generally view asset management in an industrial setting.Sharing a vision to rebrand the function of Maintenance to “Tactical Life Cycle Management” when aligned with Municipal asset management plans and how this can be achieved through Assessment based Maturity Mapping of the maintenance function.

ESG targets and reporting are becoming increasingly important. Investors and governments around the world are pushing for transparency and ever more rigorous reporting on ESG indicators. It is likely that financial regulators in North America will make ESG reporting mandatory within the next 2 years.  Many components of ESG frameworks affect asset management, and conversely good asset management can help improve an organization’s ESG scores. Think of climate change, pollution, health & safety, risk management, water use and GHG emissions to name a few.  It is therefore crucial for asset managers to understand the current frenzy around ESG reporting. Yet the ESG ecosystem can be quite baffling: there is no single definition of what ESG stands for, or what is “in” or “out”, or what reporting standard to follow.This presentation will shed some light on who does what in the ESG ecosystem, what standards and reporting options are available, and how all this will increasingly affect the way organizations make strategic decisions. Asset management has a big role to play in this context. Many asset managers have been confronted with complex, multi-stakeholder decision-making frameworks for years and are quite adept at aligning various departments to a common set of objectives. The definition of “value” in asset management often already contains many metrics that are now part of ESG reporting. We will explore how robust value frameworks can help organizations reach better decisions and improve their ESG scores – with the guidance of their asset management team!