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It’s becoming critically important these days for companies to find more efficient and effective ways to design and deliver projects.
And broad-based project collaboration is key to delivering safe, responsible, sustainable and technically-sound projects that are executed on-time and on-budget.
An upcoming workshop hosted during the Chemistry Canada Summit will provide a platform for industry leaders to share their views, define the current situation and establish a path forward.
John Boudreau, Director, Business Development at OTS, a leader in the industrial service industry, specializing in Pre-commissioning, Commissioning & Start-Up services and Operations and Maintenance, is teaming up with GO Productivity and NAIT to develop and lead the workshop.
“The workshop is basically to create an environment, a platform, for industry leaders to get together and talk about the primary challenges around project collaboration and execution and how we can improve that process,” said Boudreau. “It’s really an opportunity to pull out the key barriers, or potential barriers, to success and really identify where are we today, where do we believe we can go and what’s a realistic and achievable goal from today to say six months or a year from now.”
The interactive workshop with a group of industry experts, Improving Project Collaboration and Execution – Starting with The End in Mind, is intended for Owner/Operators, Engineering, Contractors, Sub-contractors, Procurement and Commissioning & Start-up Specialists.
It is being presented as a pre-workshop on September 24, before the Chemistry Canada Summit scheduled for September 25-26 at NAIT in Edmonton.
“If we look at investor confidence in Canada right now we’re really missing the boat and it’s really incumbent upon the industry, and that’s from the owners all the way down to contractors and sub-contractors, to really find better ways to communicate, collaborate and find more efficient execution models because if we don’t we’re risking the strength and the long-term outlook for our industry.”
He said the goal of the workshop is to highlight cost and schedule efficiencies derived from all parties engaging early for their respective scopes, as well as collaborating on all points.
Boudreau said the workshop will appeal to thought leaders in the industry around their respective subject matter areas or scope of responsibilities whether that be supply chain project managers or operations.
Lori Schmidt, CEO of GO Productivity, which is helping facilitate the workshops, said major capital projects have continued to be challenged with over-runs.
“Our projects are large and complex and even now adding technology, complexity, we’ve gotten very siloed in how we execute on these projects. So, we’ve been working with industry for about the past five or so years, with industry leaders, to say is there a way for us to look at being more collaborative throughout the whole project process in order to give us better returns, in order for us to have investment in major projects in Alberta into the future,” said Schmidt.
“We’ve been talking about it for a long time. This is an important message. Anyone who is involved in major product development has probably been nodding their heads for years saying yes we need to do this better, but we haven’t been good at actually starting to implement some of the leading practices and things that we all identified that could be done of how we actually start industry to start doing it.”
GO Productivity, based in Edmonton, is an industry-led, not-for-profit national corporation with a mandate to help businesses be more productive and innovative. Its primary focus is on small to medium size businesses as they’re in that growth phase and helping them to scale up.
“As we’re doing that, we couldn’t help but see what very inefficient supply chains are trying to play in particularly to do with major capital projects,” said Schmidt.
“The workshop session at Chemistry Canada will focus on collaborative contracting because that’s one of the first places projects start to look at non-collaborative behaviour”, she said.
“You’re basically looking at either transactional or adversarial type of contracting approaches. And starting to look at how can we do things better. How can we look at collaborating both on the relationship within our own companies and then at the project level and even at the site level? What are the types of things you can start to do there? The conference is meant to deliver this kind of message… How could it be done because it is being done in other jurisdictions.”
Although, the workshop is being offered at Chemistry Canada, the content is not specific to downstream projects. The same concepts should be applied to all upstream projects too.
For more information about the workshop Chemistry Canada, visit https://chemistry-canada.com/workshops
Feel free to contact the following individuals if you would like to learn more.
John Boudreau
Director, Business Development
OTS
jboudreau@otsl.ca
Ken Chapman
Executive in Residence
GO Productivity
ken@goproductivity.ca
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