Bluefield 30 in 30

Our guest today is Greg Sheppard who has a broad range of experience in the mining industry, starting his career as a plant operator and working his way through numerous roles in operations, maintenance, technology and statistical analysis.  Greg is currently the Processing Manager at KCGM, a company who has managed one of the most successful and enduring mining operations in Australia’s history.

Through Greg’s decades of experience, he has not only obtained valuable skills and qualifications but he has also come to understand the importance of prioritising people.  In this episode Greg shares his experience in how changing a culture on site leads to better outcomes, both for the business and for the team members. He talks about his insights on leadership roles, how best to manage difficulties on site and the importance of being an open minded team player.

 

Find Greg on LinkedIn:

https://au.linkedin.com/in/greg-sheppard-16615420

Universities and technical colleges teach a lot of valuable things that can be utilised in the workplace but there are some essential skills that simply can’t be taught in a lecture theatre. The values of hard work, understanding priorities, taking care of people, these are things that must be learned through experience.  Knowledge can be gained, but if people aren’t taken care of, a workplace will struggle to thrive.

Today’s guest is Heath Hamilton and his life is a great example of someone who has taken an alternative route, gaining his depth of knowledge through life experience.  Struggling with dyslexia, he left school at the age of 13 and began working on his family farm.  With an inherent love for machinery and doing things with his hands, he developed a keen interest in trucks which eventually led him into a long and successful career in the mining industry.

In his farming days, Heath was fortunate enough to be surrounded by good people who taught him the ropes and helped to bring out his strengths.  In those early years, he learned the importance of valuing people and recognising what each individual can bring to a workplace.  In this episode, Heath shares some of his invaluable pieces of wisdom gained through hard work, observation and good old fashioned experience.

Adrian Bancilhon commenced his mining maintenance career in Western Australia though has enjoyed the last decade on Australia’s east coast. He has experience working with iron, ore, copper, aluminium, gold, and coal and has worked in roles from the shop floor up to the general manager of maintenance.

With a perfectionist trait, he is never satisfied with ‘good enough’ and continually analyses and questions the status quo. There is a relentless quest for improvement, efficiency, safety and all done with a can-do attitude. Amongst this critical analysis is an appreciation of people, culture and practises unique to any mining organisation, and Adrian touches on the importance of being informed of these when starting any management relationship.

Further to this, Adrian talks candidly about his worst experiences as a maintenance manager, a serious workplace accident, and the difficulties he has faced with general managers. Take 30 minutes out of your day to hear from Adrian and learn from his 30+ years of experience in mining maintenance.

BOOKS WE MENTIONED:

Leading Change by Dr John Kotter

 

LINKS:

Adrian Bancilhon’s LinkedIn

Phil McMahon has a wealth of experience in maintenance and reliability.  After many years working across numerous industries, Phil came to an epiphany that no matter how great a system he had, it was the person maintaining the equipment that really mattered.  Delving deeper into his discovery, Phil studied Psychology at UNE to gain insight and understanding on how he could implement workplace systems whilst ensuring the focus was on the person doing the job.

In this episode, Phil shares some of his experiences in the workplace and the changes he has seen when sites invest in the ‘human element’.  When we focus on what individuals are naturally inclined to do, they are empowered and able to work with purpose, thus producing better results.

You can have a man maintain a piece of equipment without a system, but you can’t have a system maintain anything without the man.

BOOK WE MENTIONED:

Drive by Daniel H. Pink (Drive by Daniel H. Pink)

Seldom do you come across mining maintenance managers with as many years of service, and as much variety of experience as our guest today.

Leigh Gould, a semi-retired mining maintenance manager with well over 30 years experience and roles spanning nearly every continent in the world, discusses his vast know-how with Gerard in this episode. His career in maintenance management began alongside the introduction of computers in the early 1980s in Weipa, and he became heavily involved in the development of programmed maintenance. Over the years, he has enjoyed time in gold, copper, aluminium, iron and coal mining representing a rarely seen multi-elemental maintenance manager.

Join Leigh and Gerard in their discussion of mining maintenance across all the elements, failure mode effect analysis and reliability centred maintenance, maintenance scheduling in the era of computational expanse, and dealing with resource-intensive root cause analysis.

 

LINKS:

Leigh Gould on LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/in/leigh-gould-90291643/?originalSubdomain=au)

Bluefield 30 in 30 podcast website

With 47 years of experience since he started his apprenticeship, our guest today Tom Houston certainly has a lot of knowledge to share. An electrician by trade, Tom worked his way up through basically every role imaginable to move through to a maintenance manager position, and also senior management for central maintenance groups.

 

Tom was very interested in continuing study to better his skillset and has completed a great deal of post trade study. He has worked in production roles and health and safety roles and believes that his time on both sides of the fence has given him a good holistic understanding of how to structure a successful site and this has contributed to his successes throughout the years.

 

We’re sure that you will take plenty of learnings from this conversation and this will give you the knowledge to employ the insights learned here in your organizations to get more from your assets.

 

For more resources and information, head to the Bluefield Asset Management website.

 

To learn more about getting the most out of your assets, grab a copy of Gerard’s book Simplifying Mining Maintenance.

We’re back over in Chile today with another Spanish language episode, to sit down with Alfredo Perez who has over 30 years of experience working in the mining industry and is the Bluefield business manager in Chile.

Gerard has known Alfredo for quite some time since the days when they both worked for BHP. Alfredo has since worked for Codelco and Anglo in Chile. He is an asset category specialist which means he is on the supply side and was responsible for many years to select and procure mining equipment. This required a detailed analysis of the asset lifecycle. He has a particular love for ensuring that maintenance equipment is maintained properly and working effectively, and Alfredo loves to pass on his knowledge.

We’re sure that you will take plenty of learnings from this conversation and this will give you the knowledge to employ the insights learned here in your organizations to get more from your assets.

For more resources and information, head to the Bluefield Asset Management website.

To learn more about getting the most out of your assets, grab a copy of Gerard’s book Simplifying Mining Maintenance.

We are joined today by Norm Doxanakis who has more than 30 years of experience in the mining industry, having worked in a variety of maintenance management roles across the globe in many different companies. He started from the shop floor and worked his way all the way up to the highest level in maintenance that you can go.

Norm has always had a clear focus on building trust within the workplace, and that becomes clear from our chat on the podcast today. He emphasises the importance of physically going onsite, talking to the workers, and finding out what the pain points are. You can’t always rely on the numbers and measurements, you need to talk to your teams, and get to the bottom of any less obvious issues that could be causing inefficiencies.

We’re sure that you will take plenty of learnings from this conversation and this will give you the knowledge to employ the insights learned here in your organizations to get more from your assets.

For more resources and information, head to the Bluefield Asset Management website.

To learn more about getting the most out of your assets, grab a copy of Gerard’s book Simplifying Mining Maintenance.

We're taking you to the other side of the world today as you'll notice this episode is in Spanish, to chat to a man with over 40 years experience working in the mining maintenance industry. Julio Sotella started his career from the workshop floor and then grew into leadership roles. He has worked in mobile mining equipment and also fixed plant maintenance. He has a very practical understanding of equipment reliability and knows how to achieve it.

Our host, Gerard Wood met Julio when he was the mobile maintenance manager for Spence mine in Chile. Julio setup the Spence mine from scratch as a greenfield project and he developed a team and workshop that had the best culture around oil and fluids cleanliness of any mine in BHP at that stage. It was the only mine in BHP to receive Caterpillar 5 Star oil cleanliness accreditation. Gerard was the Global Practice Leader for Maintenance in BHP Base Metals at the time and Spence was one of the mines in this part of BHP.

On the podcast today, Julio emphasises the importance of keeping your workplace and equipment clean, and the positive outcomes this will achieve in machinery reliability. In his younger years working in an Iron Ore mine with his father, Julio noticed how dirty everything was, and when questioning his father about this, it was made apparent that the work culture at that time was that the dirtier the job site, the better the job performance. Julio did his research looking at automotive industries in other parts of the world, and came to realise that the reverse was in fact true. A clean job site, made it possible to achieve better reliability outcomes among many other benefits.

We’re sure that you will take plenty of learnings from this conversation and this will give you the knowledge to employ the insights learned here in your organizations to get more from your assets.

For more resources and information, head to the Bluefield Asset Management website (https://bluefield.com.au/). To learn more about getting the most out of your assets, grab a copy of Gerard’s book Simplifying Mining Maintenance.

Our guest today, Ian Goodwin, has more than 40 years of experience in the mining industry having worked across the globe. Ian started his career in Western Australia's iron ore industry in the mid-70s, working up from the workshop floor through supervisory and management roles, and then crossing over into the supply function. Ian became a general manager for supply and moved to the US and then on to Canada to head up maintenance and supply for Ekati Diamond Mine.

Ian then became General Manager for Ekati before moving back to Australia after 10 years in North America to lead the BHP Billiton global maintenance networks, where Ian was responsible in sharing best practices across BHP's global mining operations.

After this time, Ian supported several areas of BHP as General Manager for assets before hanging up the laptop, or so he thought. He has been in high demand since retiring and starting his asset advisory and coaching services business.

We’re sure that you will take plenty of learnings from this conversation and this will give you the knowledge to employ the insights learned here in your organizations to get more from your assets.

For more resources and information, head to the Bluefield Asset Management website (https://bluefield.com.au/). To learn more about getting the most out of your assets, grab a copy of Gerard’s book Simplifying Mining Maintenance.