PEMAC NOW 2019

FALL 2019

NOW

FEATURED ARTICLES

IMPROVE YOUR ASSET INVESTMENT LEARNING LIBRARY MORE THAN SUSTAINABLE RELIABILITY AND ITS RELATIONSHIP WITH ASSET MANAGEMENT IMPLEMENTING AN ASSET MANAGEMENT STRATEGY

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

10 IMPROVE YOUR

ASSET INVESTMENT Planning to Avoid Value Leakage.

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SECTIONS 04 PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE

Check Out PEMAC Now

LEARNING LIBRARY

Explore the Shared Learning Library.

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05 PEMAC CONGRATULATIONS Professionals who recently gained their certifications.

06 BOARD OF DIRECTORS

Get to know the members of your Board.

MORE THAN SUSTAINABLE, The Benefits of Asset Management are Intergenerational

RELIABILITY AND ITS RELATIONSHIP With Asset Management

16 08 PEMAC MEETINGS

A look at what PEMAC Chapters have been up to recently.

18 PEMAC DATA SHEET

Statistics and Numbers

IMPLEMENTING AN ASSET MANAGEMENT STRATEGY The Value of Cross Departmental Training.

FALL 2019 VOLUME 1, NUMBER 1 In association with

PUBLISHER: Mike King mking@mromagazine.com

Cindy Snedden, PEMAC Executive Director executive.director@pemac.org

EDITOR: Mario Cywinski mcywinski@mromagazine.com

Susan Lubell, PEMAC President Susan.Lubell@pemac.org

Produced Under Contract By

We do not assume any legal liability or responsibility for the accuracy, completeness or usefulness of any information, apparatus, technique or process disclosed herein.

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Check Out PEMAC Now Susan Lubell P.Eng, MBA MMP CAMA | President PEMAC PEMAC Now - the name of our new members’ magazine says it all. I’m excited to be part of this launch.

When our founding members imagined PEMAC as a not-for-profit association 29 years ago, it was with an eye to improving maintenance practices by introducing management techniques and business concepts to maintainers and their organizations. Our roots run deep in the maintenance world and we continue to be seen as an organization that connects maintenance professionals across Canada and globally, offers current and relevant training to enable our members to learn and drive business value for their organizations, and contributes to the latest developments and thinking in the field. The value to our members and their organizations through our Maintenance Management Professional (MMP) is unparalleled.

As Canada and the world have expanded into the growing field of asset management, so has PEMAC. What a natural fit with the contributions of so many of our members to their organization’s ability to drive value for their staff, customers, public, shareholders and for their own personal careers. Once again PEMAC has seized the opportunity to connect physical asset management professionals, to develop and offer an in-depth certificate program leading to a Certified Asset Management Professional (CAMP), and to contribute to the latest developments and thinking in the field.

Our new and inspired vision for the future of PEMAC – Canadian Leaders in Asset Management – and our 1,600 plus members says it all. I’m proud to have been an active member of PEMAC for over 15 years and excited for the future of PEMAC. Welcome to PEMAC Now.

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Congratulations

The following professionals have recently achieved PEMAC certifications.

January 1 to September 30, 2019 Maintenance Management Professional (MMP)

Heath Bagby Jason Bagley Paul Bentley Leonardo Bonell Jean-Francois Boucher Wassim Bounassif Rich Bullock Edwin Calles Daniel Caron Jan Dagg Christopher Davison William Davis Cesar Delgado Mathieu Desmarteau Brent Dorval Jeff Dumont Khalil Elhadaoui Trent Fahselt Coreen Farrell Ken Fischer Gaetan Fortier Sean Fortin Brie Franson Julian George Brad Giroux

Chad Keller Christian Hamelin Chris Hampton Chris Hancock Claire Hart Sarah Heikkinen Robert Heroux Steve Huybers Nalaka Jayamaha Arthur Jemiolo Lucas Jones Kent Kean Christopher Kroetsch Richard Kutzner Yann Lachaine Mitchell Langell Dave Leibel Carlos Lima Chris Lush W. Mark MacDearmid Daniel MacDonald Dana Macgillivray Dustin Marsh Kokou Mayikou Stacey Mckerral

Christopher McMahon Kerry Mcmahon Arch McMillan Blaise McNeil Wes Medernach Daniel Menard Jason Mifflin Kevin J Montroy David Morneau Cody Morton Emmauel Mueth, Haris Mulalic Tara L Munro Michael Murray Terry Nancekivell Vincent Okojie Paschal Onyekonwu Richard Paquet Austin Pisko Mazin Qays Charles Quenneville Ali Rajani Mark Ross Daniel Rouble Caneson Saintelmy

Tim Sanderson Yadwinder Sandhu Alireza Soroorian Jason Scott-Douglas Charles Scott Francois Smith Elemer Sopronyi Michael Stewart Joseph B Stuckless Muhammad Syed Colin Tayes Shawn Terpstra Francois Tremblay Stephane Trudeau Tom Turner Stephen Warwaruk Darcy Wessman Mimi Wilde Brent Williams Rob Wilson Danielle Wyshynski Julia Zhu Morey Zwarich

Certified Asset Management Professional (CAMP) Mark Boomer John Duby Dennis Edogun Garth Firth

Felix Fung Brandon Gilroy Vangel Kostevski Dehua (Albert) Liu

Darren Moore Amy Pyne Eric Van Ruymbeke Keith Rye

Emilio Sarno Severi Ricomar Santiago

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Board of Directors Susan Lubell - President Susan specializes in operational excellence with a strong focus on asset management and reliability strategy, cost effective lean maintenance programs, and continuous improvement. She brings over 20 years of practical experience to drive asset management, operations and maintenance business improvement opportunities. Susan currently serves as a National President for PEMAC and teaches for both the Maintenance Management Professional (MMP) certification and Certified Asset Management Professional (CAMP) programs.

Rob Lash - Rotating Chair Rob is currently the Manager of Central Maintenance Support, Operations, Maintenance and Monitoring, Environmental Services at the Regional Municipality of York. He started his career as a machinist at a City of Toronto Waste Water facility in the early 1980’s and advanced steadily through supervisory, management and leadership roles prior to leaving the City of Toronto in 2015 as the Manager of Optimized Maintenance for Toronto Water. At York Region he served a period of secondment as the Manager of Corporate Asset Management before returning to his current role. Rob has served on the PEMAC Board of Directors since 2008. He represented PEMAC at the GFMAM and WPiAM during his tenure as president from 2011 - 2016.

Dick Olver - Treasurer Before retiring Dick held many maintenance and operation positions in mining, metals refining, and fertilizer production and has managed a variety of system and CMMS implementations, including the introduction and customization of SAP for Agrium. His last position was the Commissioning Manager for a multibillion dollar plant expansion. Dick is past chairman of the SMRP Best Practices Committee which developed and published Maintenance and Reliability Best Practices Metrics.

He has spoken on Maintenance and Reliability topics at many conferences including the SAP-Centric EAM, PEMAC’s MainTrain, SMRP’s annual meeting and EuroMaintenance. He teaches 3 of the modules of the PEMAC MMP, Maintenance Management Professional certification program.

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J.-P. Pascoli - Vice President J.-P. is the director of physical asset management & reliability for Cameco Corporation, a Canadian uranium mining and nuclear fuel manufacturer with operations in both Saskatchewan and Ontario. He has a total of 26 years of experience in a variety of primary resource industries including mining & mineral processing, pulp & paper, and forest products.

J.-P. is a licenced professional engineer in three Canadian provinces. He is also a CMRP with SMRP and a CAMA through World Partners in Asset Management.

J.-P. has been a contributing member of PEMAC for 15 years and has been on its board of directors since 2013, serving as Vice-President in recent years. He was recently appointed PEMAC’s representative and team lead for the Global Forum for Maintenance & Asset Management’s project to revise its Maintenance Framework publication.

Nigel D’Souza - Rotating Chair Nigel is a licensed Professional Engineer in Ontario with a career spanning private and public sector operations, maintenance, and corporate leadership. As the Manager of Facilities Services with the Simcoe Muskoka Catholic District School Board, Nigel leads a team of professionals in the maintenance and capital of 50 schools for over 21,000 students. With over a decade of leading asset and maintenance management practices. Before being elected to the Board of Directors, Nigel served as the President of the GTA Chapter. He continues to contribute to PEMAC through committee work.

Abrar Ahmad - Director Abrar has been the Maintenance & Reliability Enablement Specialist at a leading oil company.

His current role is to help establish sound systems, processes, training and methodologies to support integrated reliability programs and related projects.

Abrar has worked in the industry for 29+ years and has very diversified experience in the oil and gas, petrochemicals, fertilizers and other industries. He has more than 18 years of experience with CMMS specifically SAP Plant Maintenance.

In addition, Abrar is currently the National Director of PEMAC Canada and an approved instructor for multiple AMP & MMP courses.

Mike Crowell - Director Mike is the Director of Maintenance for Irving Forest Services. He is a certified Maintenance Management Professional with a relentless drive and focus on improving the way we work every day. Mike is passionate about recruiting, hiring, and developing the talent and long term careers within the pulp and paper manufacturing sites and across all J.D.Irving companies.

Paul Daoust - Director Paul Daoust has almost 30 years of experience in asset management and operational excellence in the energy sector.

As the founder of Scio Asset Management, Paul is declaring war on mediocrity and empowering progressive operational leaders to make more, better decisions to stop value leakage in their organizations through learning, coaching, advising services and technology solutions.

As a director of PEMAC, Paul is a leading international advocate for asset management practices for industrial and infrastructure asset-owning organizations.

James Kovacevic - Director James Kovacevic is a passionate and driven asset management professional based in Windsor, Ontario, with over 10 years of experience in maintenance, reliability, and asset management.

Currently, James serves as Principal Instructor at Eruditio.

Previously, he founded HP Reliability, where he is infinitely dedicated to helping manufacturers attain maximum profitability, all while ensuring quality jobs and thriving communities. James is also the Host of the ‘Rooted In Reliability’ podcast. Kovacevic holds a multitude of certifications, including Certified Maintenance & Reliability Professional (CMRP), Maintenance Management Professional (MMP), and Certified Asset Management Assessor (CAMA). He also studied business and commerce in-depth at St. Clair College.

Leonard Middleton - Director Leonard is an experienced international management consultant with over 35 years’ of professional experience. He focuses upon improving clients’ organizational performance through improvements in their maintenance, reliability and asset management strategy, practices and processes. He has worked and consulted in a number of different asset intensive industries, including heavy manufacturing, automotive, mining, oil & gas, petrochemical, power generation, and electrical transmission and distribution.

Leonard is a long-term member of PEMAC and a longserving member of the Board of Directors. He has taught a number of the MMP courses, and has developed and reviewed content for a number of courses.

Chris Murphy - Director Chris Murphy has over 30 years of experience in plant maintenance, reliability, and comprehensive asset information in heavy industry including, power generation, oil & gas, logistics, mining, and smelting. Chris holds valid credentials as a Certified Reliability Leader (CRL), a Certified Asset Management Assessor (CAMA), a certificate in Asset Management from the (IAM), a Red Seal Journeyman Millwright certificate, and a certified Power Engineer. Chris has managed many CMMS data build and conversion projects encompassing complete asset information lifecycle requirements for both greenfield mega-projects and brownfield operations. Currently, Chris provides both strategic and tactical leadership as a board director for PEMAC, charged with establishing an asset management and maintenance competency framework and serving on numerous local, national, and international committees including the GFMAM.

James Reyes-Picknell - Director James Reyes-Picknell is an MMP instructor, PEMAC volunteer and Board Member. He is Founder and President of Conscious Asset, and co-author of the best seller, “Uptime - Strategies for Excellence in Maintenance Management’’, several other books and numerous magazine articles. His latest publication in April 2017, co-authored with Jesus Sifonte is destined to change the RCM “world” for the better while showing how RCM is an integral aspect of Asset Management. James is a Professional Engineer, Certified Management Consultant and a thoughtleader in the fields of maintenance and asset reliability. He works with clients in asset intensive industries such as resource extraction and processing, utilities, transportation and manufacturing where high reliability is a key to business success.

Cliff Williams - Director Cliff Williams is a thirty year plus veteran of the maintenance field, author and international speaker, who has worked in the Pulp and Paper and Steel industries as well as with food giants Coca Cola, Kraft and Wrigley. In his present position at ERCO Worldwide, Cliff help drive the maintenance performance at their plants in North and South America. Cliff ’s PEMAC membership and volunteer services reach back to 2002. He has taught many offerings of several modules in the PEMAC Maintenance Management Professional (MMP) certification program which he has helped to promote and develop.

He is now actively instructing in the Asset Management Professional program and serving the Asset Management curriculum development panel. Cliff was the 2012 recipient of PEMAC’s “Sergio Guy Memorial Award”.

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PEMAC Meetings PEMAC has local chapters across canada. Each PEMAC chapter establishes its own regional strategy and goals and manages its own budget. Here is a look at what PEMAC chapters have been up to.

(above) Nova Scotia Chapter Meeting.

(right) The Winnipeg Chapter hosts the Manitoba Summit. (below) PEMAC exhibiting at the APMA annual conference.

Greater Toronto Area (GTA) Chapter meeting.

Fort McMurray, AB, Chapter Meeting.

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Alberta Chapter networking night.

GTA Chapter tour of the St. Lawrence Seaway.

GTA Chapter meeting at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Maintenance Optimization and Reliability Engineering.

PEMAC exhibiting at the APMA.

GTA Chapter tour of the ACE facility at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology.

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2019-10-30 11:05 AM

Improve Your Asset Investment Planning to Avoid Value Leakage

By Paul Daoust

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hen I got off the phone I couldn’t quite believe what I’d heard. My organization had been doing some sharing with another organization in the same industry about asset management. My counterpart had just given me a detailed account of how they were intending to improve their asset investment planning practice to make better capital allocation decisions.

It all sounded reasonable except for one big thing that bothered me. The new target practice for their organization sounded exactly like where my organization had been already for several years. And I had a long list of reasons why my company’s practice wasn’t good enough.

In asset investment planning, research suggests the difference between best practice and what most organizations have is somewhere between 8–20% in value. This means an organization with a sustaining annual capital spend of $200M will effectively lose somewhere between $16–40M each year. This means either they’re spending too much or not getting enough risk mitigation. Either way, a good chunk of their spend is inefficient.

Where did this loss go? Nobody knows because it is an open system. The loss can’t be proven true or false retroactively because there’s no alternate universe with which to compare.

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Nevertheless, poof — it is gone. This is one of many reasons companies find themselves scratching their head in second or third quartile benchmark performance.

I discovered this value leakage through a series of hard knocks as a manager of investment planning for group operations. This is where I began to differentiate leading asset investment planning practice from one that was merely mediocre.

My first exposure to proper asset life cycle costing coupled with capital investment decision support had come a few years prior. I had the pleasure to work with David Mauney who came from the Utility sector in the US and had co-written what would become my bible, Risk-Based Methods for Equipment Life Management. David commercialized those principles in a simple but effective set of spreadsheet tools he called Financial Risk Optimization. It was from David I learned how technical people must present the problems and solutions in terms that financial people can understand to successfully make their business case. This work, more than anything helped me set my expectations on best practice for asset investment planning.

Before we dive into details of the practice, there are several prerequisites, each a topic on its own. First, we must utilize a systematic approach to identify all the problems worth managing, rather than the default method by exception. Next, we must apply good structured problem-solving methods such as

A3 and resist the temptation to jump into solutioning. Then, we will apply risk-based assessments but don’t fall into the trap of assuming people are good at understanding uncertainty. Fortunately, people can be calibrated and trained to become very good risk assessors.

Dismiss these foundations at your peril. I’ve seen many underestimate their power and thereby guarantee a mediocre result. Garbage in, garbage out.

So that gets us to the starting line.

The first question of an asset investment planning practice is, what question are you asking? Many organizations aren’t asking or answering the best question.

The question most organizations ask is, “What are the best projects we can implement given a spending constraint?” A better question to ask is, “What performance do our assets need to provide and what are the lowest life cycle cost strategies to achieve that performance at a risk tolerable to the organization?”

It’s a mouthful but answering this question is worth every ounce of effort as it forces a holistic view on performance, spends and risk.

There is a difference between prioritization and optimization to reach the best decisions.

Prioritization consists of force ranking your projects on a cost-benefit ratio until the money runs out. The risk is not doing the project. The cost consists of the new capital and hopefully, routine operations and maintenance spend changes.

Optimization, however, can consider multiple solution alternatives and multiple objectives simultaneously. Some math is required but through simple modelling, you can solve for the best sets of solutions.

A key benefit of optimization is you can solve for the best spend rather accept a constraint often established with little consideration for asset life cycle needs.

The best form of optimization will integrate a fully quantitative approach. Most organizations have practices that are deterministic, rather than probabilistic.

Making decisions under conditions of uncertainty is the case in all asset investment planning. There is a competency most practitioners and leaders must gain to think and act probabilistically because we are deterministic by nature.

The proper way to express and uncertainty is the answer and your confidence around that response.

The uncertainty about your answer is just as important as the answer itself. Great decision-making requires a quantitative risk-based approach. This will be an unpopular and controversial opinion but throw your risk matrices and heat maps away! Research has shown they do not add value for decision support.

Lastly, you get to choose the scope for which your capital projects compete. Is it just within one spend bucket, one facility or across an operational business unit, region or the entire enterprise? Do you encour-

“ In asset investment planning, research suggests the difference between best practice and what most organizations have is somewhere between 8–20% in value.”

age competition between Capex and Opex? Do you allow projects to compete beyond operations to growth, IT and other corporate services vying for capital? As your practice matures you will gain confidence in competition yield better decisions in broad capital allocation.

Despite the arguments above, many organizations continue to stubbornly believe their asset investment planning practice is good enough.

Nothing to see here. This is fine.

You might think the leading practice features I’ve described require significant incremental effort. Not necessarily. Many organizations already spend plenty of time and energy on this practice. There is research to suggest you might be able to lower your overall effort by as much as 20%. That said, there is an incremental investment in your peoples’ competencies and appropriate decision-support tools. Considering the massive continuing value leakage that investment is very small, presenting an excellent ROI opportunity.

Judge for yourself whether your organization has a leading or mediocre asset investment planning practice.

If there was a reasonable way to achieve best practice with a superior decision support tool to recapture 8–20% of your sustaining capital portfolio value — would you, could you change your asset investment planning practice?

Paul Daoust has almost 30 years of experience in asset management and operational excellence in the energy sector.

As the founder of Scio Asset Management, Paul is declaring war on mediocrity and empowering progressive operational leaders to make better decisions to stop value leakage in their organizations through learning, coaching, advising services and technology solutions As a director of PEMAC, Paul is a leading international advocate for asset management practices for industrial and infrastructure asset-owning organizations.

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Learning Library Explore the shared learning library pemac.org/shared-learning-library

PEMAC’s Shared Learning Library is a collection of resources, developed and shared by PEMAC members and contributors.

The goal is that no matter what subject is of interest, the relevant learning resources to expand understanding are available and that collective learning opportunities are made available to all members of our association, thereby creating a legacy for the industry and our association.

Asset Decision Framework For Optimal Value

Most organisations have implemented processes and tools to collect data to facilitate informed decision-making.

Often, they will seek out best practices and measures to assist in decision-making or rely on technology to guide the basis of decisions. However, in many cases these same organisations approach a gap in tactical deployment and the ability to draw a connection to the follow-up or pre-emptive actions required to derive value from assets.

This presentation will review the processes for establishing a framework for alignment and priority setting, while looking at the techniques employed for resiliency and risk management using a technology agnostic approach. We will review potential data sources which can be leveraged for decision-making and

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which reflect the needs and current state of the business environment. Further, we will discuss the relationship and application to the decision-making process.

An overview of the fundamental outcome of key performance indicators and visualized metrics will be demonstrated.

Finally, we will investigate the influence on decision-making and the level of data confidence.

Author: Nigel D’Souza.

Building The Business Case For Maintenance Improvement While a host of factors influence profitability, maximizing your plant’s production output potential is arguably one of the facility’s greatest opportunities.

An Asset Management, Reliability and Maintenance Strategic Plan can guide continuous improvement that’s aligned

with bottom-line performance expectations for managing assets and people. This presentation will provide a framework approach for establishing your strategic asset management & reliability plan and the associated business case. Delegates will gain a fundamental understanding of how to establish a baseline: “know where you are,” define where you’re going, who needs to be involved, how to measure the program’s progress and results, and what elements are essential for success.

Author: Susan Lubell.

The 5 Levels Of Maintenance Scheduling Coordinating all of the maintenance activities within a site can be overwhelming. A schedule is supposed to help reduce the sense of being overwhelmed. But why is it that when trying to pull together a schedule for the next shift, day or week, it always seems to be a mad dash? Having a simple, easy to use scheduling process can reduce the mad dash and enable us to project an image of being in control of our work. This leads to trust with the Operations planning team, creating an integrate schedule.

Author: James Kovacevic.

More than Sustainable, the Benefits of Asset Management are Intergenerational

By Nicolle Guillen

S

ustainability is an important objective these days, and many organizations are working to develop and implement policies that consider the long-term impact of their operations. Given its focus on “whole-of-life”, Asset Management has an important role to play in efforts to continuously improve sustainability efforts.

Brenda Kelly, Asset Manager for the Planning, Property & Development Department for the City of Winnipeg, is clear that improvements to sustainability can be achieved through excellent asset management. When talking about the future impact of the Asset Management decisions that are made today, Brenda likes to remind people about the children of tomorrow.

Participating in PEMAC’s Asset Management Professional (AMP) program for cross-functional municipal teams, Brenda and four other professionals from a variety of departments at the City of Winnipeg are learning a lot more about Asset Management than they thought, together.

“I’ve learned that the holistic view of asset management is important - and that this view needs to be intergenerational.

If we are adding a large structure in a complex for example, the cost of this structure cannot be paid for in four years.

In the design we need to consider how we are going to pass these costs, both structurally and environmentally, to future generations,” shares Brenda. “We need to be good stewards as we consider these costs and leave the future generations with a better footprint than we inherited”.

Brenda and the City of Winnipeg team are part of a wave of 120 participants from various roles, and from 45 municipalities across Canada, who are taking a learning journey together through the six courses of the PEMAC Asset Management Professional program with the goal of meaningfully improving the asset management practices of their municipality.

This initiative has been made possible by the Municipal Asset Management Program, which is delivered by the Federation of Canadian Municipalities and funded by the Government of Canada.

Over half way through the program now, the participants have delved into a broad range of asset management subject matter including: principles and strategic development, capabilities development, risk management and performance improvement. “In my role in the asset management group at the City of Winnipeg, I already had an understanding of asset management, but I also knew there was more to learn. Having the opportunity to share and learn from other municipalities

both large and small, as well as the insightful instructors, I am able to make better decisions for my municipality,” says Brenda. “No matter the municipality size or whether it’s rural or urban, each municipality has something to share and the program provides a framework for us to learn from each other.”

Learning from other municipalities is important, but so is learning from each department within a single municipality.

The mixture of roles within the program has allowed the participants to see asset management from different perspectives.

Finance, maintenance, operations, and even city council are all learning and working together to get alignment on appropriate asset management strategies that can be supported organization wide.

“No matter your role in an organization, asset management is everyone’s responsibility. Learning together in this program has encouraged all of these departments to plan holistically,” states Brenda. “Rural municipalities are managing multiple portfolios and have a broader understanding of their assets.

Insights and decisions are more siloed in larger municipalities.

But we all need to move away from isolated thinking if we are going to create holistic, long-term asset management plans.

I am confident that an intergenerational benefit will be the result as we advance in asset management practice at the City of Winnipeg.”

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Reliability and its relationship with Asset Management

By James Reyes-Picknell

A

sset management depends on reliability to achieve its goal of delivering value.

We need our physical assets to continue to do what we want them to do to achieve that. That is very much the definition of what reliability stands for in a single asset or system.

Asset management does the same thing, on a larger scale and across a portfolio of assets. In a sense, reliability is one key aspect of asset management that is often not written or talked about. Outside our profession, reliability is not so well understood, and perhaps too many asset managers are a bit too focused on the financial aspects of asset management – believing them to be “more strategic”.

Ensuring your physical assets can do what you want them to do, safely, without harming the environment, at low cost and for long sustained periods at high levels of utilization is highly strategic. It puts all that capital that was invested and those OPEX dollars to good use. In fact building in, sustaining and

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Reliability keeps things going, Asset management delivers value with managed risks. operating to achieve high reliability is simply good asset stewardship. Isn’t that also a key aspect of good asset management?

Reliability keeps things going, asset management delivers “value” with managed risks. We can measure reliability with uptime, availability, and times between failure events. There’s plenty of established reliability mathematics and analysis. Value is a bit tougher though.

Value means different things to different stakeholders. A stakeholder can

be anyone with an interest, even indirectly, in what that portfolio of assets does. The can be owners of the assets, their users, environmental regulators, customers, employees, suppliers, maintainers, operators, and even the general public. Consider that if the asset is public infrastructure, like our highway system, our entire society becomes a stakeholder as both users and owners. Privately held assets, like chemical plants, gas pipelines, electrical transmission lines, gasoline pumps at the local gas station, and even your car can all impact on the public, who are also stakeholders. Yes indeed, the public has an interest in your car, albeit indirectly, yet specifically in whether it meets emission standards and can operate safely.

Each stakeholder may have a different reason for caring, but they all have something in common. No matter what or how they perceive value, they all depend in one way or another on the asset doing what it is meant to do.

In other words, there is a shared and arguably universal interest in reliability of assets. If the assets you manage are

not reliable, then value is limited, diminished or destroyed, risks can increase and your various stakeholders can be hurt. Your car, for instance, can hurt pedestrians if its brakes fail. Populations can be killed by toxic gases leaking from chemical plants. Companies and can lose revenue if there is a loss of electric supply, and so on. If you look at almost any man-made disaster, those involving our physical assets, it is almost always because they failed for some reason.

They were designed inadequately, poorly built, operated incorrectly, poorly or not maintained. We simply don’t want those failures to happen so we must keep the assets reliable. Reliable assets minimize the risk of those occurrences.

Reliability is a way of measuring the ability of the physical asset to do what we want it to, under known conditions, for a period of time – the longer the better. Dependable is another word that expresses the same concept – the asset is trustworthy.

One thing we care about managing within our asset management system, is risk. Risk is a combination of probability of an event occurring and the severity of its consequences.

It’s a given that all physical assets can and likely will fail at some point in time. The reasons are varied and many of those can be managed. Knowing how something can fail and what happens when the failure occurs enables us to determine the consequences of the failure. In asset management and in Reliability we pay a great deal of attention to risks and their management.

We will take significant steps to either lower the probability of failure, or the consequences. We can do that by eliminating the failure through design, reducing its probability of failure through design, operating practices, and / or maintenance. If consequences are potentially severe and probability can only be reduced, but not eliminated, then we consider other mitigating actions.

Guards around couplings on rotating machinery reduce the potential for injuries in the event that coupling fails.

Good design (an engineering function), installation with precision alignment (a maintenance function), and operating the machinery within its design limits

Risk is a combination of probability of an event occurring and the severity of its consequences.

job planning), identification of resources (spares, tools, test equipment, skills, etc.), logistics preparation (e.g.: how many spares, where to stock them, what training to give operators, etc.). In good asset management, doing this at the design stage optimizes the operational and maintenance phases of the life cycle to follow. You set yourself up for success!

That sort of fore-sight means lower life cycles and greater service (value) from the assets. It requires a relatively small investment up front and delivers a huge return on that investment so long as you own and operate the asset.

Providing for Reliability and its ongoing realization, is an excellent asset man-

(an operating function) all contribute to reducing the probability of that failure, but the can not completely eliminate it.

An excellent way to determine risks and what to do about them is Reliability Centered Maintenance. In RCM we identify functions (what we want the asset to do), how it can fail, failure modes (events) that can occur, their causes, and consequences. Then we decide what steps to take to lower those risks.

Once the RCM analysis is done, you will know what failures to expect, maintenance actions, operating procedures, training, process or other design changes that might be needed. You even know where risks are tolerably low, so you can confidently do nothing – run it to failure!

Knowing all that enables further planning (e.g.: maintenance standard

agement practice. There is still much more to asset management, yet keeping a focus on reliability ensure that a good deal of the value from that asset investment will be realized at low risk.

James Reyes-Picknell, is the Principal Consultant of Conscious Asset, a member of PEMAC board of directors, author of the MMP module 1 text, “Uptime –Strategies for Excellence in Maintenance Management” 3rd ed. (2015), and co-author of “Reliability Centered Maintenance – Re-Engineered” (2017). He is a frequent public speaker, blogger and author of numerous magazine articles. In 2016, James was awarded PEMAC’s prestigious Sergio Guy Memorial Award in recognition of outstanding contributions to the maintenance profession.

James can be reached at +1 705 727 7436 or james@consciousasset.com.

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Implementing an Asset Management Strategy Doug Stretton is the GM, Asset Management at Sherritt International Corporation’s operations in Fort Saskatchewan, AB. Sherritt is a Canadian Resource Company with business interests in nickel and cobalt mining and refining, oil and gas exploration and production, and electricity generation. With operations in Canada, Cuba and Madagascar; Sherritt’s, oldest maintained operational site is in Fort Saskatchewan.

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hange at the helm often presents new opportunities, and in 2018 with Doug as the new GM of Asset Management at Sherritt’s metals refinery operation, the company proactively began the implementation of asset management strategy

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as part of the company’s initiative to use Operational Excellence as a spearhead to improve the organization’s performance.

The foundation to sustaining this type of progress is having a solid strategy and linking it to the people. Sherritt chose to accelerate their people’s knowledge of

asset management through an educational initiative that took advantage of PEMAC’s Maintenance Management Professional (MMP) certification. Over 120 employees, including many whose professional expertise was outside the traditional field of maintenance management participated in onsite courses. Empowering colleagues from across departments to collaborate and work together from a place of common understanding can further solidify the company’s ranking amongst lowest cost producers.

“I wanted to arm the staff with solid, credible in-depth knowledge of asset management, and to create a workplace

culture where shared understanding across departments continues to enable safe, environmentally responsible, profitable production,” reported Doug.

With the anticipation of increased demands emerging from the electrical vehicle market, Sherritt, who produces high purity nickel and cobalt, is well poised to continue to serve the market as it grows. The organization’s growth strategy built further strength through this education initiative enabling better strategy and decision making when it comes to managing the lifecycle of Sherritt’s physical assets.

Doug was familiar with PEMAC and

the benefits of the MMP program, having applied the uptime methodology found in the first module of the program within other organizations. He knew the MMP program contained the applied educational tools necessary to create long term sustainability and productivity, and he wanted to apply those skills at Sherritt as well. Doug knows that effective maintenance, reliability and asset management is more than just maintaining Sherritt’s physical assets. This type of education would ultimately allow the company to build upon its long-established history and continue to set itself up for increased future success. He also

knew that the immediate application of this new knowledge was possible, creating an instant return on investment.

“Hosting specific modules of the MMP program onsite created many benefits for our organization. We partnered with Northern Lakes College to deliver Module 1: An Integrated Strategy for Maintenance Management first to over 120 personnel.,” shares Doug. “This onsite delivery model allowed us to schedule classes around our staff ’s availability and minimized impacts in fulfilling job requirements.”

Doug recognized that if he limited this learning to just the maintenance teams, the newly developed maintenance and asset management processes wouldn’t be able to reach its full potential within the organization.

“When co-workers are able to understand maintenance management techniques from the same perspective, and have input into building better plans, the execution of those plans are more streamlined and efficient,” shares Doug.

“When a well-versed maintenance team and the functional groups that they regularly interface with have effective twoway communication grounded in a common language, organizations are able to provide more cost-effective management of their physical assets.”

The timing of this educational journey coincided with an earmarking of Alberta government grants aimed at supporting continued technical career training and development. This grant program enabled Sherritt to deliver the initial module, as well as module 5 of the program, Developing and Implementing Maintenance Tactics, and module 6: Maintenance Work Management, onsite over the winter months to many of the module one participants.

Today the practitioners at Sherritt have the skills to drive improvements in integrated business processes, operational productivity and cost reductions while ensuring an increased economic life of the organization’s assets. Doug’s philosophy that even the smallest improvement can have a big impact on the bottom line is motivation for others to strive for operational excellence and has had a positive impact on production at Sherritt’s International’s Fort Saskatchewan facility.

P E M A C N O W FA L L 2019

17

STATISTICS AND NUMBERS

47 14

MMP & CAMP CERTIFICATIONS

33

MEMBERSHIPS & CERTIFICATIONS

ALLIED

CORPORATE

ORGNANIZATIONS HOLDING MEMBERSHIPS

INDIVIDUAL MEMBERSHIPS

+1600

870

HUMAN RESOURCES

MEMBERSHIP ONLY

DATA SHEET

4 FTE

STAFF

2

7

YT

NT

383

106 66 21

18

AB

2

NU

115 BC

73

0

54

79 SK

NL

556 MB

ON

95 QC

771

66

ACTIVE VOLUNTEERS

27 40 NB

PE

18 NS

CANADA - NO PROVINCE DATA NO COUNTRY DATA OUTSIDE CANADA P E M A C N O W FA L L 2019

PEMAC_Nov19_NorthernLakes.indd 1

2019-10-22 11:22 AM

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