PEMAC Member Spotlight
H
ammad was born and raised in the City of Hyderabad located in Pakistan, where he finished his undergraduate degree in mechanical engineering. After 1 year with a local mining company in Pakistan, Hammad got a job working on middle-east opera¬tions through the Cairo Technical Center with the Canadian company, Lafarge Cement. Through his work with Lafarge, Hammad got a good grounding in maintenance and reli¬ability as well as a background in international engineering standards and practices. Given his developing career with a Canadian company, Hammad applied for permanent residency in Canada. Soon after being approved he accepted a position with Lafarge in British Columbia. Shortly after arriving in Canada in 2010 the position he had taken this big risk for was ‘downsized’ due to a corporate merger. As Hammad says, “I lost my anchor point. I actively began strategizing, seeking ways and methods of finding new work so that I could continue my professional career in Canada. This is when I found PEMAC and connected with Norm Clegg [PEMAC’s 2nd Executive Director]. Norm was very kind by providing me an opportunity to volunteer so that I could meet people. He also encouraged me to enroll in the MMP program. Hammad could already boast international experi¬ence and applied knowledge of maintenance and reliability with Canadian companies, but he still saw the Maintenance Management Professional (MMP) program as a way to net-work and to get attention in the Canadian market for his skills and abilities. He took the step of enrolling in Course 1 and also applied for prior learning recognition for 3 of the subsequent courses in the program. “Even that first module was a good jump-start for me to get familiarized with the Canadian context. Right after that I got an offer from Holcim Canada. After just a 3 month pause I was back in a maintenance and reliability role again. I am grateful for that pause because it gave me the opportunity to recognize the value of networking and to gain local creden¬tials. Later when I applied for a Reliability Engineer role with my current company, BHP, I think it helped to put me on the top of the short-list. I joined BHP in 2012 and continued my MMP studies with very good support from my supervisor until I finished in 2015. PEMAC has helped me to connect with a lot of good people in Canadian industry. I attend MainTrain whenever possible,
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participating as both a delegate and a presenter, sharing what I have learned about embedding reliability in design. MainTrain provides a great opportunity to do benchmarking and to keep up to date with emerging technologies and trends. It’s good to learn from other industries represented there as well. There are different good things happening in every indus¬try in maintenance and reliability.” In the role Hammad holds now, the higher-level Asset Management principles really come into play which is why he pursued the CAMA certification. “Actually, Asset Management was always my area of interest. During my undergraduate stud¬ies I did part-time work for Markus Evans events in Pakistan. They had a call center staffed by people with good English who could pitch conferences to the target attendees. They had a conference about Asset Management that they sold to execu¬tives. I was totally unfamiliar with Asset Management at the time but learning about the content of that conference so that I could sell it gave me a lot of insight and exposure to what it is, what the elements are, and what the benefits are. That always excited me. It’s a really cool thing to think about that now. “Back in early 2000s Asset Management was generally considered as a theoretical concept but not very feasible to apply practically. But I always saw how it applied in practice from the ground up. I have persevered and put asset manage¬ment elements into practice associated with the design, operations and maintenance phases of lifecycle in every role, every step along the way e.g. fit for purpose equipment selection, data management, and appropriate maintenance strategy deploy¬ment. It is all important and it is necessary to integrate asset management concepts from the bottom-up. It is all relevant to addressing risk for the organization. Hammad fully appreciates how much PEMAC and the MMP program helped him as a newcomer to translate his prior knowledge and experience into a rewarding career in Canada. It’s clear that his long-held interest in the principles and benefits of asset management, his orientation to continuous improvement and his proactive orientation to life have played a big role. With respect to his career Hammad has exemplified the PEMAC motto of “connect, learn, contribute”. He now holds a corporate role, “Principal Reliability Engineer” at BHP as well as an acting position, “Manager of Strategy and Planning” with an asset portfolio of greater than one billion dollars! Hammad lives in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan with his wife and two small children.
Photos: Getty Images / ktsimage
By Hammad Sharif, MMP, CAMA
