As the busiest port on the Canadian side of the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Seaway navigation system, the Port of Hamilton plays an integral role in supporting trade between Canada and the U.S. as well as overseas destinations. With thousands of jobs dependent on the cargo that is transported in and out of this port, one 12-person maintenance team is responsible for ensuring a variety of buildings, warehouses and infrastructure remain in good working order year-round.

Check out the full story in the March/April 2013 issue of PEM.

Sixteen people, a heap of dedicated hard work, and one vision. During 2011 and 2012, these elements came together seamlessly at Cameco in Port Hope, culminating in a unique production loss tracking system that has gained the team involved company-wide attention, as well as one national award so far.

Check out the full story in the March/April 2013 issue of PEM.

If the importance of maintenance being involved at both ends of a plant’s life cycle wasn’t already apparent, GreenField Ethanol’s Johnstown facility’s enviable maintenance practices will make you a believer. Watch what the winning team in the Best Maintenance–Large Facility award category (sponsored by Siemens) has to say.

Check out the full story in the March/April 2013 issue of PEM.

Are you proud of your maintenance team and want to give them a little recognition? Using a new technology? Then nominate them for the PEM Maintenance Award and let your success story be known.

New this year, there are separate categories for small and large facilities, along with a third category about the most innovative use of technology.

So get started! Please tell us a little about your maintenance team by completing our online submission form at www.pem-mag.com/PEMmainawards.


Now is your chance to step into the industry spotlight. As a winner, your team gets a plaque and is featured on the cover of the March/April 2013 issue of PEM. Now is your chance to step into the industry spotlight.

The PEM Maintenance Awards were first introduced in 1999 and through this program. The mandate of the award is to acknowledge and reward maintenance excellence and asset management professionalism. Past ward winners include CN Tower, Goodrich Landing Gear, EnCana Corporation, Grant Forest Products Inc., Canadian Tire, City of Mississauga, ArcelorMittal Dofasco, City of Toronto (Toronto Wastewater), Purolator Courier Ltd. and Gennum Corp.

Located on the edge of Lake Ontario just east of downtown Toronto, PEM’s 2011 Maintenance Award winner is Pickering Nuclear — one of the world's largest nuclear generating facilities, right here in Canada. The massive plant has six operating CANDU (Canadian Deuterium Uranium) reactors, and all together, the station has a total output of 3,100 megawatts.

There are people here 24 hours a day, 365 days a year,” explains Jim Whyte, director of work management at Pickering Nuclear. “I find the ebb and flow of people in and out of here to be amazing.”

It takes quite a large, talented team to keep a facility of such size operational. He says there are more than 900 employees in maintenance alone and another 600 in operations at the Pickering site.

Additionally, it takes a large numbers of jobs and a schedule to keep everything running as it should. “We schedule about 2,500 maintenance tasks per week for our online schedule,” Whyte continues. “And during outages, we have a task rate of somewhere between 200 and 250 tasks per day on the shutdown unit. 

“Keeping all that scheduled … and making sure work is ready is a full-time job for people on the site.”

Ken Sutton is the manager of work control at this location. His department, working with all other departments, coordinates timely identification, screening, scoping, planning, scheduling and execution of all work necessary to maximize the availability and reliability of the station equipment and systems. It’s a big responsibility, and the company tracks its completion rates in order to grow and improve from week to week.

“We measure this every week and we have trend graphs and 13-week rolling averages,” he says. “And after every week we have what’s called a T+1 meeting where the whole group sits down with our metrics and talks about and learns from the issues of the previous week.” From that point, they take actions and make corrections.

It’s time well spent. This site’s reliability will be even more critical for the next eight years as Ontario undergoes a nuclear power makeover.

A Critical Juncture
Nuclear represents nearly 50 percent of OPG’s total production and over half of Ontario’s electricity generation. In 2011, the Ontario government began to implement its Long-Term Energy Plan, recognizing the need to build new nuclear units at the Darlington site, to undergo the mid-life refurbishment of the units at the Darlington station and to invest in the continued operation of Pickering — until 2020.

Summer 2011 marked 40 years of generation for Pickering, and due to its age, it is now operating toward an end of life that’s planned for around 2020. Complicating matters, before Pickering is taken off line for good, its power will be needed to keep the province flush with electricity as the 22-year-old four-unit Darlington station undergoes a unit-by-unit refurbishment process starting in 2016.

In a speech, Tom Mitchell, president and CEO of Ontario Power Generation, said, “All eyes will be on us to make sure we get it right.”

In February 2010, Ontario Power generation (OPG) announced it would proceed with the planning for the refurbishment of the Darlington station. The decision came after the positive outcomes of initial studies on the plant’s condition and continued strong safety and operating performance. Post-refurbishment, the station would operate for an additional 25 to 30 years. OPG’s success depends on all its departments working together. As a corporate mission, OPG says all its power sources must demonstrate strong project management expertise by delivering outages and projects safely, on time and on budget.

One of the people seeing Pickering through this transition process is Whyte, who has been working at this facility on and off for around 30 years. “Pickering is preparing to make up lost power … by ensuring that the six units we have operating are operating as reliably as possible. We have a target forced-loss rate — which is the period of time when we’re not available — of less than five percent by 2015. And we plan to achieve that production rate by investing in the plant, ensuring that our preventive maintenance work gets done, that our outages are executed on time with the scope that we intend, and that we complete maintenance on major plant components.”

Teamwork
Tammy Mullins, a maintenance specialist, says having all departments — operations, engineering and maintenance — working as a team is necessary to do the job right. “We all need everybody’s support to complete all the tasks, whether it’s a scaffold, whether is insulation removal, whether it’s engineering support,” she says. “We’re very strong team players here, and it shows in the pride we show our plant and in our equipment,” she adds.

In order to get all potential issue or concerns on the table, they hold work control meetings. “We look at the plan for parts holds, we look at the plan for system configuration and we make sure it’s sequenced and scheduled properly,” and they go through every task, work together, bring issues forward and get them settled in the room. It can mean deferring work, changing work or cutting work for other purposes.

For an example of facilitating communication between departments, technical engineer/officer Heather Au — the facility’s engineering preventative maintenance single point of contact — acts as a facilitator between the maintenance, operations and work-control organizations and engineering.

Daily, she interfaces with work control to ensure the preventive maintenance program is being executed as planned. “There are hiccups along the way, and that’s where I come in, interfacing with maintenance and engineering services, to see what we can do to get the work done.”

Being able to problem-solve issues between departments demonstrates teamwork, and Mullins recounts once success story when they had an issue changing the lights over a pool where all the fuel from the reactor building is stored.

“What my group had to do was to build a scaffold on top of the crane in order to get to the lights,” she explains. “There was an issue with the scaffold because the engineers needed the scaffold to approve the tie-off points (and they couldn’t go up there without a scaffold), and we couldn’t build the scaffold because we needed the tie-off points.” The groups had several “challenge” meetings and finally came up with a path forward, so the job was done safely, on time and the lights were replaced.

“That was an example of engineering and maintenance working together, working through challenges to get work done.”

Safety is Paramount
Donning earplugs, safety glasses, protective shoes and hard hats, we toured one of the incredibly impressive and noisy turbine buildings. The massive structure, which is approximately 382 metres long, 54 metres wide and 45 metres high, contained four turbine generators, each with a single shaft rotating at 1,800 rpm. Unable to approach the operating turbine for safety reasons, we stood beside one of the turbine replacement blades. Next to this imposing, spiraling helix of metal, we were dwarfed in comparison — and it dawned on me that this is no any ordinary plant.

Safety was the key consideration that guided the design and construction of the station. The CANDU system includes several ways to safely shut down reactors, and in the unlikely event of a serious incident, the multiple barrier safety system will prevent any harmful release of radiation.

At Pickering, safety and reliability aren’t separate — they are related. All the operations staff, Whyte says, understands that maintenance is directly equated to reliability and reliability is directly equated to safety. “Safe production is our thing. We won’t run if it’s not safe. And if there’s any question about it whatsoever, we shut the units down.

“The key to avoiding that situation,” he stresses, “is maintenance.”

Au reiterates the importance of this mindset, explaining that safety is truly their No. 1 priority — and that includes employee, plant and public safety.
“Employees are fully trained and qualified for their roles and responsibilities,” she says. “On a day-to-day basis, all jobs — big and small — begin with a pre-job brief to discuss potential hazards on the job-site, to discuss error-likely situations, to familiarize with the task at hand, to discuss expected results and back-out conditions, and to review any questions, issues, or previous experience with similar work.

“Bottom line: safety is never compromised in anything we do because we don’t want employees getting injured.”

Whyte adds that they assign “criticality codes” for their equipment. They are coded one through four in terms of their importance to production or safety. Code 1 and Code 2 work is treated with the highest respect: “We don’t delay the preventative maintenance, we execute the work on time and we put a lot of effort and energy into making sure the work is ready to go.”

So for now, OPG will plan for the continued operation of the Pickering station over the next decade to ensure electricity needs are met during the Darlington refurbishment. In the mean time, the province’s citizens have one large maintenance team to thank for helping keep everything running smoothly. Because a lot depends on them.

“We’re very proud of where we work,” Sutton says. “We work hard. And to be recognized, that means something to us. We’re proud to show our facility off.”

PEM is providing maintenance and facility managers the opportunity to tell their success stories. Don't be intimidated: we accept applications from facilities large and small!

So get started! Please tell us a little about your maintenance team by completing our online submission form:


Fill out the online form


Now is your chance to step into the industry spotlight. As a winner, your team gets a plaque and is featured on the cover of the February 2012 issue of PEM. Now is your chance to step into the industry spotlight.

The PEM Maintenance Awards were first introduced in 1999 and through this program. The mandate of the award is to acknowledge and reward maintenance excellence and asset management professionalism. Past ward winners include CN Tower, Goodrich Landing Gear, EnCana Corporation, Grant Forest Products Inc., Canadian Tire, City of Mississauga, ArcelorMittal Dofasco, City of Toronto (Toronto Wastewater), Purolator Courier Ltd. and Gennum Corp.

The votes are in and the winners have emerged. After rigorous screening by members of the judging panel, the search for Canada’s Safest Employers has ended and five companies from Canada’s manufacturing industry have earned the title of Canada’s Safest Employers.

•    Atotech Canada Ltd. (Ontario)
•    CCI Thermal Technologies, Inc. (Ontario)
•    GE Aviation (Quebec)
•    Innovative Automation, Inc. (Ontario)
•    Pratt & Whitney Canada — Halifax (Nova Scotia)

In its inaugural year, the search for Canada’s Safest Employers focused on the manufacturing industry. Over 100 nominations were received from employers across the country. In addition to the nomination forms — where nominees provided details of their health and safety management system — qualified entrants were also asked to complete a safety perception survey. The survey was administered to their employees and the results were provided to our judges for consideration.

The safety perception survey provided a snapshot of how a company’s health and safety programs and policies are viewed by their employees.

“Canadian Occupational Safety is proud to announce the five companies that emerged as the most exemplary in their safety performance and therefore, deserving to be called Canada’s Safest Employers,” says Mari-Len De Guzman, editor of Canadian Occupational Safety magazine, organizer of Canada’s Safest Employers Award.

“The response to Canada’s Safest Employers Award has been impressive. We reviewed over a hundred submissions and commend all these companies for the work that they do in keeping their workers and workplace safe.”

The award will be presented to the winners at a gala dinner on Tuesday, September 27, at the Liberty Grand Entertainment Complex in Toronto. 

Canada’s Safest Employers Award was launched in December 2010 as a program to recognize outstanding Canadian companies that are making a difference in promoting the health and safety of their workers. The search for the 2012 Canada’s Safest Employers will open this December and will be expanding to other industries beyond manufacturing.

Pick up a copy of the August/September 2011 issue of Canadian Occupational Safety magazine to learn more about this year’s Canada’s Safest Employers Award recipients.

Canadian Occupational Safety magazine is Canada’s premier information source for health and safety professionals, published six times a year by Aurora, Ont.-based Annex Publishing and Printing Inc.

Canada’s Safest Employers Award is sponsored by Acklands-Grainger Inc. (title sponsor); MSA (silver sponsor); Toyota Industrial, SBH Management Lawyers, Compass Health and Safety Ltd , Danatec  and 3M. For more information about Canada’s Safest Employers Award, visit the website at www.safestemployers.com.

Ernst & Young has revealed this year's finalists for Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year award, and they include several in the energy sector out West, including Edmonton-based FourQuest Energy Inc., which provides maintenance and shutdown service to the oil and gas industry.

"Entrepreneurs have the unique ability to turn ideas into market-leading companies. But they don't grow by standing still — they take risks, innovate, and invest," says David Boomer, Prairies Director of Entrepreneur Of The Year. "With no limit to what Canadian entrepreneurs can accomplish in today's global marketplace, now is the time to work together to create a business environment where entrepreneurs can thrive."

Included among the finalists were several entrepreneurs involved in energy services maintenance and engineering:

• Calgary's Compass Compression Services Ltd.: A privately owned company specializing in engineering, design, packaging and servicing of reciprocating, rotary screw and rotary vane compression systems and equipment.

• Edmonton's FourQuest Energy Inc.: Provides pre-commissioning, maintenance and shutdown service to the oil and gas industry. Services include nitrogen services, air services, oil flushing, fluid pumping, chemical cleaning, steam blowing and engineering consulting.

• Acheson, Alta.'s Morgan Construction and Environmental Ltd.: Serves the oil and gas industry as a heavy equiptment contractor in Western and Northern Canada.

• Calgary's Questor Technology Inc.: An international environmental clean air technology oilfield service company specializing in providing sustainable custom incineration solutions to eliminate flared gas and utilize waste energy.

In a new global survey of entrepreneurs — Nature or nurture? — Ernst & Young uncovered that funding, people and know-how were the biggest barriers to entrepreneurial success. Among the six out of 10 respondents who experienced obstacles in their ventures, 33% called lack of funding or finance their biggest stumbling block.

Boomer says that's only the first issue. Entrepreneurs need improved access to credit in addition to new educational opportunities and less red tape. He also underlined better leadership from Corporate Canada, which stands to gain by building an internal spirit of entrepreneurship — or intrapreneurship — into their business model to promote innovation, creativity and fresh thinking.

"By showing tremendous focus and strength of character, entrepreneurs are able to turn challenges into opportunities and take their businesses to the next level. Even the financial crisis wasn't a deterrent for many," says Boomer. "Now it's up to governments and corporations to support our next generation of entrepreneurs by working together to address some of these challenges."

In April, an Ernst & Young/Financial Post survey found more than one-third of entrepreneur respondents were more optimistic about their company's' future prospects than they were just six months ago. Boomer says that's a positive step in the right direction.

The Entrepreneur Of The Year Awards recognize the spirit and contribution of entrepreneurs here and around the world. The Canadian program is in its 18th year of honouring the country's most impressive entrepreneurs from all areas of business. Award winners are chosen based on their vision, leadership, financial success and social responsibility.

The Prairies winners will be announced at a banquet on Oct. 18, and the overall winner will represent the region at the national banquet held in Toronto on Nov. 23.
www.ey.com/ca/eoy
www.compasscompression.com
fourquest.com
www.mcel.ca
www.questortech.com

Maintenance professionals across Canada are beginning to look forward to one particular portion of the annual "Main Event" conference in Toronto (see page 4 for a wrap-up of the event). It's the ceremony where the Main Event's "Awards for Maintenance Excellence" are given out, and these awards are contested from entrants across the country.

This year, there were four awards up for grabs: Best Maintained Small Plant/Facility (one with less than 50 maintenance employees); Best Maintained Large Plant/Facility (one with more than 50 maintenance employees); Best Use of Technology/Maintenance Innovation; and Maintenance Manager of the Year.

The 2000 Awards for Maintenance Excellence were judged by a three member panel, made up of Bill Davison, president of the Plant Engineering and Maintenance Association of Canada; Jim Picknell, a consultant in the physical asset management division of PricewaterhouseCoopers and the chair of the Main Event conference, and Paul Challen, the former editor of PEM Plant Engineering and Maintenance magazine. The three judges met during the conference to weed through the nominations from well-qualified entrants, to come up with the deserving winners.

Emerging as the Best Maintained Small Plant/Facility was Nitrochem Corp., of Maitland, Ontario. Winner of the Best Maintained Large Plant/Facility was Suncor Energy of Fort McMurray, Alberta's upgrading division. The award for the Best Use of Technology/Maintenance Innovation was captured by pulp and paper manufacturer Irving of St. John, New Brunswick. And taking home individual honours as Maintenance Manager of the Year was Alan Richards of Gennum Corporation in Burlington, Ontario.

In the pages that follow, you'll get to meet these four winners, and will have the chance to learn more about the world-class operations that mark the day-to-day sites where these award-winning efforts take place. We hope they'll give you a glimpse into the highest standards of maintenance currently being practised in Canada.

And from us here at PEM, we'd like to extend congratulations to the deserving winners.

Finding the right maintenance chemistry

Best Maintained Small Plant/Facility
Harold Neumann, Maintenance Manager
Nitrochem Corp., Maitland, Ontario

Talk to anyone involved with plant maintenance and operations at the Maitland, Ontario site of Nitrochem Corp. — one of Canada's largest producers of nitric acid, ammonium nitrate and nitrogen solutions — and they'll likely return to one, unifying concept. It's what they call "mutual trust," and for the maintenance team at the eastern Ontario plant, it's the central theme in a five-year restructuring plan.

A determined co-operation between maintenance and production departments paid off in many ways, including a jump in overall uptime of 86 percent in 1994 to 92 percent in 2000, and a marked decrease in plant shutdowns from 294 in 1994 to only 24 in 2000, plus a considerable savings in overall maintenance budget and a bearings-failure decrease — due to an improved oil analysis program — of 300 percent.

"Our common goal was plant reliability and cooperation between maintenance and production," says Harold Neumann, maintenance manager at the plant and one of the driving forces behind the improvements that have been taking place at Nitrochem ever since a massive fire destroyed the majority of the processing capacity at one of the facility's five plants. "The aim was threefold: to reduce the amount of emergency work; to identify potential equipment failures and to address these repairs during the day to prevent downtime; and to plan repairs to co-ordinate with production requirements so that a full repair could be achieved instead of a Band-Aid solution. This meant that both production and maintenance teams had to work together to prioritize their workload."

Neumann is quick to spread the credit for the improvements around the plant. "Our first step was to build the foundation we needed to implement our maintenance practices. The employees became part of the decision-making process and planning stages," he says. "Our programs were employee-owned and driven. We gave our people the authority to address and solve problems. In time, they became self-motivated and safety-conscientious workers."

Part of the drive toward employee empowerment was motivated, Neumann says, by a desire to increase the visibility of the maintenance staff within the plant as a whole — to move from a culture of simply fixing machinery to one that prevents failure and troubleshoots possible breakdowns.

But how was all of this accomplished? The key, says Neumann, was dialogue. The maintenance team implemented Monday management meetings, and daily 8 a.m. "tailgate meetings" for 15-20 minutes to discuss upcoming shutdowns, safety equipment, and any incidents or concerns that have been cropping up on site. These were complemented by "safety walks" to investigate work requests that had special safety concerns.

Another of the keys to the award-winning initiative was the creation of a new position within the maintenance team. It's called the "plant inspector," and this planning/scheduling position is filled at Nitrochem by Roy Arter, who accounts for more than 90 percent of the non-destructive examination testing at the plant.

Training has also played a big part in the five-year plan. In 1995, Nitrochem millwrights began a comprehensive laser alignment training program, which was followed by further skills-development in vibration analysis for all plant rotation equipment, and the oil analysis program mentioned above.

The shift in maintenance culture at Nitrochem has had some other concrete, labour-based effects as well. Prior to the changes, the maintenance crew worked shifts. Now they work straight days, supplemented by a call-out list for emergencies. "About the only complaint we hear now from the team guys is that there is not enough opportunity to work overtime," says Neumann.

A reliable source of energy

Best Maintained Large Plant/Facility
Mike Blanchard, General Manager of Maintenance and Engineering
Suncor Energy, Inc., Fort McMurray, Alberta

"Communication has to be non-stop. You have to share your strategy, involve the workforce, share the results of your efforts. You will get a small percentage of the shop floor that will not buy in to change, but you have to remember to keep moving forward. It has taken us four years to get to where we are today at our facility and we still recognize many areas for improvement. We have found that the path to excellence is never ending but the gains made are highly rewarding."

That's Mike Blanchard, general manager of maintenance and engineering at the oil and gas refining giant Suncor Energy, Inc.'s upgrading division in Fort McMurray, Alberta. He's talking about the central philosophy that helped his division win this year's award for best-maintained large facility.

Blanchard says his maintenance team believed that while they had some good basic maintenance practices in place four years ago, they knew there was still room for improvement. They focused on mechanical availability, followed by maintenance costs. The process started with a review of overall maintenance practices — individual roles, responsibilities, planning, work order process, measures, etc. — and the development of an agreed to strategic plan.

The division was helped along by PricewaterhouseCoopers in these areas (they were nominated for the award by PWC consultant Len Middleton, who had worked with the Fort McMurray-based operation in their maintenance upgrading efforts), and the two organizations worked on benchmarking key processes on the electrical/instrumentation side of maintenance, as a way of moving ahead. "Before taking benchmarking on as an initiative, one has to have an appreciation of the time, resources and commitment that it takes. One of our benchmarking initiatives in the area of electrical/instrumentation maintenance took about one year to complete," says Blanchard. "One of the many advantages of benchmarking is the learning from others and the wealth of information that can be exchanged. Benchmarking at our facility is a continuous process."

Another key strategic thrust at Suncor was an adherence to RCM methodology. "We got involved with the RCM process as part of our strategy to reduce our maintenance effort," says Blanchard. We have used RCM on a selective basis, and our RCM initiatives required an integrated effort by operations, process engineering, maintenance engineers and maintenance trades. It has helped us in optimizing equipment PM/Pdm's, understanding failure mechanisms, spare parts, etc. We view RCM as a long term investment."

Blanchard also gives credit to Suncor's system of improved turnaround planning, which he says can be expensive, not only in terms of material costs, labour, supporting structure, etc., but also because of lost production. "To assist us in achieving effective and efficient turnaround process, we maintain a full-time turnaround team led by a turnaround manager," explains Blanchard.

Things have certainly worked out well as far as streamlining several key maintenance practices, to the point where Suncor now has one of the lowest electrical/instrumentation maintenance costs per unit of output in the entire oil and gas industry. "A gain in reliability has helped us the most in lowering our maintenance costs," says Blanchard. "In the area of E&I we have moved more to condition-monitoring, improved planning and scheduling, and developed reliability teams focused on ?Â¥bad actors'. Basically, the shift has been from reactive to proactive maintenance, and this contributes to our ongoing effort to lower those per-barrel production costs."

Finally, Blanchard says that training in several key areas went a long way towards improving maintenance practices as well. The technicians at Suncor underwent gap-analysis tests on skills and job requirements, and from this, each person had a three-year training plan formulated for them. "There was not a big need for re-education, but the training was more along the lines of learning to utilize new technology," says Blanchard.

Putting it on paper

Best Use of Technology/Maintenance Innovation
Doug Walker, Maintenance Manager
Irving Pulp & Paper Ltd., St. John, New Brunswick

Although he's the man at the helm of this year's award for the best use of maintenance technology or maintenance innovation, Doug Walker, the maintenance manager at Irving Pulp & Paper in St. John, New Brunswick, is quick to spread the credit for the accolades around to his maintenance teammates at the paper-making giant.

"These are the guys who did all the work — I'm just the one with his name on the top of the nomination form," says Walker of the company's victory. The guys Walker is talking about — maintenance mechanic Jerry Roberge; maintenance mechanic and lead trainer Bob McInnis; and reliability engineers Jean Albert and Mike Bonga — formed the core of the award-winning team.

For 2000, the team identified a six-part strategy for improving maintenance practices. This was comprised of:
- re-defining the role of the maintenance department as a "premier supplier" to other divisions like operations and engineering within the company;
- establishing the principle of "environmental stewardship" to cut down on spills, leakage and losses;
- developing a profitable and self-renewing methodology aimed at reducing maintenance costs and improving databases to ensure accuracy of performance-measurement indicators;
- implementing a mill-wide technical excellence program, including a comprehensive vibration-analysis and tank and vessel inspection programs;
- a commitment to the development of personal performance improvements, monitored by planning and reviews between maintenance staff and managers; and
- the reinforcement of Irving's position as a valued community member, with maintenance playing a key role in the facility's physical appearance to the outside world.

"There really were a lot of continuous-improvement issues we had to address," says Roberge. "And we wouldn't have accomplished any of them if we didn't work together. By getting people on all levels of the organization to work together, we were able to improve the decision-making process in maintenance."

Part of the key, says Walker, was in identifying world-class levels of maintenance performance, developing the methodology to achieve them, and then getting the message on how this was to be accomplished across to teams at all levels. And the success of that initiative lay in this collection of accurate information. "About 18 months ago, we determined that we really did not have the right kind of data to guide us — to help us determine where productivity losses were being caused. Our existing ERP program was not helping in this area, so, in a mill-wide initiative, we wrote our own software, to capture better data that tells us exactly what to fix, and when."

This software initiative also went a long way towards encouraging the staff empowerment that the Irving maintenance department was hoping to further. "Now we drive the software, instead of it driving us," says Albert.

Another key aspect to Irving's success in maintenance was training. Instead of bringing in an outside trainer or looking for an in-house employee who specializes only in training, Walker and his team decided to look within the facility itself. They found McInnis, a self-confessed "hourly sheet-metal guy" and union representative, who was more than happy to establish his own in-house training program in the kind of skills Irving needed to push their maintenance efforts forward. "This allowed a lot of overlap," says McInnis. "It allowed people from the mills to get an introduction to various trades that they would not have otherwise been exposed to, and to develop our labour force to a much greater extent."

High-tech success

Maintenance Manager of the Year
Alan Richards, Equipment Engineering Manager
Gennum Corporation, Burlington, Ontario

Alan Richards' first year at silicon components manufacturer Gennum Corporation in Burlington, Ontario was a good one. Although Richards, a native of Wales who's also worked in the high-tech field in England and Ireland, only arrived in Canada in January, 2000, he capped off the year by winning the Maintenance Manager of the Year award at the Main Event.

Richards won the award based on a comprehensive series of maintenance improvements he spearheaded at Gennum. "The basic idea is to establish people in our department as equipment owners, as opposed to equipment users," says Richards. "Once someone starts to think of themselves as owning a tool or piece of equipment, they start to sort out maintenance questions and problems more pro-actively."

One of Richards' key initiatives was to establish a new position with his equipment engineering group — that of the CEC, or Cluster Equipment Coordinator. The people nominated to these positions then took on supervision responsibility for smaller groups of personnel, which in turn allowed for better communications across shifts and a reduction in the overlap of resources. "Essentially, this is a team-leadership position, and again, the person in this role takes on responsibility for equipment availability," says Richards. "It basically saves us a lot of time running around, and a lot of overlap in effort. It's classic micro-management, and drops the ratio of worker to supervisor from about 18:1, to 4 or 5 :1.

Richards has also done extensive work in improving Gennum's preventive maintenance database, including the implementation of a SWAT- special work action team — group, that works to address extended down-time problems that measure longer than 24 hours of equipment non-availability to manufacturing.

"The important thing was to change the culture here to one of predictive maintenance," says Richards of his relatively short time at Gennum. "There appeared to be a lot of doing PMs just for the sake of doing PMs, and in high-tech industries in particular, where replacing equipment can be extremely expensive, this isn't an effective approach. It's far better to work on predictive and preventive measures."

Richards has also implemented another policy which is key in the high-tech field — that of tighter clean-room policies as far as the introduction of new and ancillary equipment into the clean-room facilities. And, he's introduced a thorough TPM initiative within the plant's assembly areas.

So what does Richards think of winning Canada's major maintenance award such a short while after arriving in Canada? "Well, it was certainly a nice welcome here," he says.

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Paul Challen is the former editor of PEM Plant Engineering and Maintenance. Janine Belzak is a freelance writer who lives in Dundas, Ontario.