7.2 Education, Training & Development

The world your business operates in is constantly changing. Supply chain disruptions, market pressures, budget constraints, regulatory changes, extreme weather, new technology, challenges retaining experienced engineers and maintenance technicians, and more can impact the operating context of your assets and equipment.Minimizing risk, and maintaining high performing assets in the face of constant change often requires organizations to accelerate the rate at which risk and criticality are re-assessed, maintenance strategies updated, people and systems enabled, and new maintenance plans put into practice; connecting the dots in a closed loop process.In this webinar, we will share practical approaches to help you connect the dots between strategy and execution, and ensure the investments you make in your reliability based maintenance program are put into action and deliver the intended results as the broader organization and asset management context continues to change.

This presentation is a case study on the Maintenance Journey for the Simcoe Muskoka Catholic District School Board guiding participants through the transformation of the school board's maintenance department which originally consisted of an informal program focussed on breakdown maintenance and reactive work, and to the current state of a formal maintenance program.The journey includes leveraging resources to baseline maturity and establish focus areas for evolving practices and adding structure. I will speak about specific initiatives completed and are in process which have established the organisation's programs, engagement, clarity, and purpose. It's a good news story which will also share how the tools and practices inherently part of the PEMAC community and body of knowledge have assisted in modernizing this team and organisation.

In this session, we will look at the professional development pathways available from institutions and educational bodies from around the world. Special guest Dave Daines will look in detail at the professional development pathways the WPiAM can offer individuals and organizations, both now and in the future, through the GCS. Susan Lubell will discuss PEMAC’s approach to certifications, how they align to the GCS, and the many benefits to our PEMAC members as individuals and the organizations that employ them of hiring certified asset management, maintenance, and reliability professionals. Specific content will focus on MMP, CAMP, CSAM, CPAM, CTAM, and CAMA, as well as career development, transportability, transferability, and rigorous process for evaluation.

PEMAC encourages new speakers and we'd like to invite you to get engaged in a speaking role. In this session you will hear our four experts talk about speaking at conferences, share some funny stories, where they've been, who they've met and how it has helped their careers.Questions that we will cover are:Tell us about yourselfTell us a bit about your speaking experiences – good and badTell us what you think the rewards can be for speakers, meet people, travel, build relationships, make connections etcGive us one tip for creating the path to these rewards. Could be about your presentation, your fears, how to communicate with audience, how to follow up etc. 

How well maintenance, reliability and asset management is done in organizations impacts the entire business. The consequences of not getting it right range from unsafe workplaces to damaged customer and community relations. Learn how PEMAC's accessible educational opportunities can bring value to organizations through case studies across a variety of industries. Thousands of participants who have a variety of roles within their organizations have taken PEMAC certified courses and have shared their knowledge and skills with their teams. Companies have targeted PEMAC courses to drive excellence in maintenance, reliability and asset management. Taking a one team, one language approach to learning and decision making, organizations benefit from PEMAC education. Join us and learn more.

 Article from Fall 2020 edition of PEMAC Now

Imagine your production facility as a 1950s pickup truck. It’s functional, but a lack of available parts, new regulatory standards, and an absence of modern sensors and electronics make diagnosing problems and improving performance difficult. Commissioned in 1954, Sherritt International Corporation faces many challenges characteristic of a classic car—challenges that not only include equipment lifecycles, but also human resources, software, workflows, and asset obsolescence. This case study will review the training, business process transformation projects, organizational design changes, and continuous improvement initiatives that Sherritt is implementing to modernize their work management processes. See how optimization of these processes have helped address the challenges presented by an aging site, and learn how projects were prioritized, which initiatives helped build organizational capability and improve performance, and what wasn’t worth the effort.

A road map to excellence, connect, learn, contribute (share the driving and revise your trip along the way!) AND Take a detour once in a while... Road trips are a great way to see a country. You start with a reason for the trip and then you map out the route. Along the way you discover that your original route may not be the one you still want to be taking. The PEMAC and Northern Lakes College partnership is like that. In 2004 it started with delivering the Maintenance Management Professional (MMP) program, live online, and from there it has flourished to delivering all PEMAC programs/courses to participants across Canada and around the world. In an 18 year partnership you learn a lot together. This presentation will focus on how 3 small words, connect, learn, contribute, have continued to drive the partnership through all the years and what lessons we learned along the way. These lessons are ones that apply to all partnerships - in your workplace, with your customers, in your community - excellence is a shared learning journey.

Recently there was a lot of discussion on various forums around the term ‘Human Asset’. It was prompted by a paper/presentation made by Dr. Monique Beedles in Australia where she questioned the term and the appropriateness of using it based on the definition of an asset in ISO 55000 – ‘an item, thing, or entity that has value or potential value to the organisation (ISO, 2014)’.There were questions posed on the various forums as to the use of ‘thing’ to describe humans – it’s legal meaning, it’s cultural implications and though most posting felt the term was appropriate, there was definitely a difference of opinion. What wasn’t brought out in most of the discussions was the intent or suitability of the decision to word the definition that way. No-one disagreed with the idea that a human ‘has value or potential value to the organization’ and so rather than argue about the term, I’d like to explore how we could apply the tools and lifecycle approach we use for physical assets, to humans. Let’s walk through the lifecycles and see if we can find how it might apply to humans.Concept Design Acquire Operations and Maintenance Decommission So as I said I won’t address the term ‘human asset’ but hopefully you can see that taking the same approach to ensure that the ‘value or potential value to the organization’ is certainly a good alternative.

We will be presenting a case study of why a new mobile Plant Maintenance application was required to replace their Agentry solution with the BlueWorx Plant Maintenance solution for their 1900 technicians at a large oil & gas organization in Canada. The need was to improve: executing work orders, raise notifications, execute proper inspections of their assets and equipment to meet their requirements and utilizing GIS to geo spatially locate work. One of the most important reasons on deciding to displace the Agentry solution is to help alleviate their previous cumbersome and frustrating process of slow transmit times and cryptic errors to a faster sync time combines with an administrator tool that’s an easy-to-follow guided process, to correct any processing error that the technician will encounter on a daily basis, to achieve more accurate data recorded to the backend. The pain points they faced were not having the ability to carry out and do inspections in an efficient manner, major transmit fails because of the non-ability to upload large data points and cryptic errors messages. The key driver for the client is the ability to easily enhance the out of box functionality to suit their business model and needs. This also gave them enhanced field capabilities and access digital documentation to assist in their daily tasks. We will showcase the implementation approach, associated project deliverables and ingredients to making this a success for both the customer and S4A IT Solutions. This was all achieved during an unprecedented pandemic which forced us to deliver this project from many continents, all while being delivered fully remote. What was to be achieved of the new solution? The solution helped transform and improve not only their current in-adequate maintenance solution, but also helped culturally shift, across multiple business units, a non engaged workforce into a fully engaged, collaborative team which resulted in increased efficiency. The new solution has transformed business processes into a paperless workflow to help with waste reduction, regulatory compliance, tool time productivity, downtime reduction and enhanced data driven decision making.