Workplace Challenges
Developing engineering skills across boundariesImagine you have an engineering firm and one of the oil companies wants you to design a new drilling rig to use in the Norwegian sector of the North Sea. But, your best platform designers work in Halifax and Calgary. DAVID CHILTON |
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 [ 2007-02-28 ] |
Canadian engineers in Halifax were supported by colleagues in Montreal, the UK and Azerbaijan to provide services to the Eirik Raude semi-submersible drilling rig. (Photo: Amec)
Of course, you could team them up in either of the Canadian cities or even send them to Oslo. Or you could, if your company was Oakville-based AMEC, use distributed engineering, a system that allocates engineering and design work on the basis of who's best for the job rather than who's working where.
Michael Joliffe, AMEC's vice-president of government relations and communications, says that as an international company it became obvious that to be competitive and to have a real point of difference in the market using the strengths of its employees wherever they worked was essential.
"That's where (distributed engineering) sprang out of," Joliffe says. "As a result, today, within a Canadian context we have several centres of excellence which work on projects outside of Canada. These employees can work in Toronto or Halifax or Calgary or Vancouver but they don't have to leave home to work in projects in Dubai and Azerbaijan and Peru and Australia."
Joliffe says distributed engineering is part of a continuing operating philosophy that began five or six years ago.
AMEC's distributed engineering uses a real-time project management system called Convero that allows engineers in different ends of the country -- or on different continents -- to work collaboratively from their respective computers. To get technical, Convero is a fully integrated management information base that can operate in either a web or client-server Windows environment.
Distributed engineering also allows AMEC to exploit cyclical markets. Joliffe says Calgary is hot right now because of oil sands development. "Here, in our office in Oakville, we're working on one of the oils sands projects. The work is shared between our Vancouver office, our Calgary office and our Oakville office."
One of the reasons distributed engineering works so well for AMEC is the sheer size of the company, Joliffe says. Its 45,000 employees are scattered among more than 40 countries around the world working on projects from Ireland to Ontario's first diamond mine on the southern shores of James Bay and due on stream next year. In fact, Joliffe can only guess at a couple of firms big enough to use AMEC's methods.
One of AMEC's 45,000 employees is Nicole Grieco, who used distributed engineering while working on open pit mining operations in Peru. She says there is a great upside to the system working with different people in different places on different projects. But, says Grieco, who's spent time in front of a computer at the mine itself and at her office in Oakville, there can be a downside, which in her case was personal rather than anything to do with the way she was working: at 4,000 metres above sea level, Grieco says she had to endure altitude sickness.
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