01 Business & Organization Context

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.

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.

Within the asset management and maintenance management scope, school boards are predominantly responsible for facilities and associated infrastructure. It’s critical to ensure spaces are available and safe for continued program delivery, while supporting unique legislative and political requirements. The Simcoe Muskoka Catholic District School Board (SMCDSB) Facilities Services Department consists of a small centralized team supplemented by various contractors and consultants. The SMCDSB has been transitioning from informal practices to structured processes over the last four years and recently undertook an initiative to implement Reliability Centred Maintenance (RCM) through a pilot project on a critical heating system at a secondary school. Tasked with a large geographical service area and a complex portfolio, the SMCDSB Facilities Services team determined it was necessary to explore opportunities to improve reliability while mitigating risk and optimizing resourcing. Leveraging knowledge from PEMAC’s MMP Module 5 set the foundation for establishing the business case for an RCM pilot project for a critical heating system for a secondary school. The project began in March 2023 and is on schedule for completion and implementation in June 2023. This presentation will outline the process of program development for RCM implementation for buy-in, establishing the plan for the initiative, the process that was developed, and the outcomes. We will share the journey, lessons learned, and how success is being measured.

Cameco Corp. has recently deployed approximately 1,500 wireless asset condition monitoring sensors across four of its operations. This presentation will explore all aspects of this project, from initial identification of business pain, all the way through to deployment and management of the system. Condition-based monitoring of rotating assets typically involves a route that is executed at a fixed interval to collect asset condition data. This data can include vibration, temperature, acoustic emissions, and others. This data is then downloaded into software and analyzed for faults and trends. This method has many shortcomings that can be solved with remote sensing technology. This presentation will take you through Cameco’s journey of identifying the limitations of traditional data collection and why an alternative was investigated. Some of the key topics will include problems and inefficiencies with the current system, methodology used to determine which sensor company to partner with, potential cost savings and benefits, deployment strategy and execution, and some screen captures of actual asset detections. Finally, we will conclude with lessons learned and benefits realized from deploying a sensor solution.

An Intelligent machine can sense its environment, take a decision and apply an action or give a recommendation. How this can transform maintenance? With every Industrial Revolution, Maintenance tools and strategies grow to provide the needed service for this industrial era. Now what shall we do with the Augmented reality and other technologies that Industry 4.0 introduces in the production environment??! It is important to understand what AI -Artificial Intelligence in details is because it is currently part of our work and life even if we do not realize this. When we understand how AI works, we can use it as our ally. Otherwise, we shall resist its existence specially when it starts to give recommendations and report of what went good and what went bad. AI is a title frequently applied to the project of developing systems with the intellectual similar to those of humans, such as the ability to reason, discover meaning, generalize, or learn from past experience. The human maintenance team applies its intellectual process at every situation it encounters. This intellectual process includes the ability to reason, discover meaning, generalize, or learn from experience. How AI does this? It is all based on software and Algorithms. There are two (2) ways for the software to yield intelligent advices or actions. You either add to it all the possible solutions of a problem and the software searches through all possibilities to find a one matching to this situation, then returns the stored actions for this possibility. Alternatively, the other way is to let the algorithms of the intelligent software infer some reasoning based on the inputs then solve the problem. . Let us relate this to maintenance

What if diversity and inclusion were more than what we can physically identify? What if the key to true results from diversity and inclusion initiatives wasn’t ticking boxes to ensure you have met the letter of the law? Lastly, what if diversity applied not just to affirmative action but to how your people and departments work together and the results of that collaboration (or lack thereof)? This presentation will answer these questions and discuss a framework for building a culture that not only is diverse, inclusive, equitable, and inviting but also enables synergy and productivity within your facility. We will discuss the BRIDGE principles and then apply them in a way that enables engineering, asset management, and maintenance to become productive and healthy cultures for all. Lastly, we will provide tools and strategies for empowering employees to speak up and share their ideas. This is not your typical diversity and inclusion discussion that’s generally limited to HR. This is a tool to enable diversity and inclusion from within. Whether you’re a manager or team member, or just starting out in your career, this presentation will provide you with the knowledge and skills necessary to build a more diverse, inclusive, and equitable workplace.

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.