Many organisations invest heavily in maintenance, digital tools, and capital projects yet still fail to capture the full economic, safety, and sustainability value of their physical assets because governance is missing. This workshop bridges the gap between strategy and execution by helping leaders define a clear asset management value thesis, establish governance for risk-scaled decision making, clarify ownership across strategy, engineering, operations, and maintenance, and build a practical 12–24 month transformation roadmap aligned to measurable outcomes for safety, performance, and capital stewardship.

• What Drives Enterprise Value
• Lifecycle Asset Value Creation
• Human Factors & Organisational Reality
• Sustainability, Energy & External Stakeholders
• Maturity & Economic Opportunity
• Governance Foundations (Tier 1)
• Design & Acquisition Discipline (Tier II)
• Operate & Maintain with Precision (Tier III)
• Environment, Energy & External Risk (Tier IV)
• Capability, Assurance & Scaling (Tier V)

Despite years of investment, most organisations remain stuck in an endless cycle of AI pilots that never deliver operational value. The numbers are sobering: 76% of AI initiatives fail to achieve expected returns, manufacturing failure rates sit at 76.4%, and only around 11% of organisations have genuinely scaled AI into production. Leadership ambition continues to outpace workforce readiness, with AI skills scoring the lowest of any readiness dimension at 2.69 out of 5.

This workshop is for maintenance and reliability managers tired of proofs of concept that work in isolation but evaporate the moment they meet real operational systems and messy data. We'll examine why pilots fail at scale, what high-performing organisations do differently, and how to build the foundational capabilities - clean data, system integration, workforce literacy, and governance - that determine whether AI delivers value or becomes another sunk cost. We'll also tackle the more provocative opportunity: rather than using AI to optimise existing processes for marginal 10% gains, how do you reinvent maintenance entirely to be dynamic, responsive, and tied to actual operating conditions?

• A diagnostic framework for assessing whether your organisation is genuinely AI-ready or simply AI-curious
• Strategies for closing the gap between leadership ambition and workforce capability
• A governance approach addressing transparency, accountability, and the boundaries between AI recommendations and human judgement in safety-critical environments
• A reinvention-first methodology: what would maintenance look like with unlimited resources and perfect information, and where can AI realistically bridge that gap?

Bring your current AI initiatives, your scepticism, and your hardest integration problems - we'll work through them together.

In the African bush, a master tracker stakes everything on faint, ambiguous signals — a bent stalk of grass, the temperature of a track in the sand, the alarm call of an oxpecker high in a tree. The terrain shifts constantly, the information is always incomplete, and the cost of a poor read is immediate and severe. Yet the finest trackers do not survive by gathering more data. They survive by noticing what matters, interpreting it in context, testing their assumptions against the ground, conserving their energy, and moving with disciplined purpose toward an outcome they cannot yet see.

Senior asset, maintenance and reliability leaders operate in remarkably similar country. You make consequential decisions surrounded by sensors, dashboards, risk registers and competing priorities — and still the early signs of an emerging failure are weak, noisy and easy to rationalise away. The most experienced among you already know the deeper truth this masterclass is built on: reliability is not won by collecting more information. It is won by reading the right information early.

Led by Ian Schubach — one of the world's most renowned African trackers, who spent his formative years living alongside and learning to read lions — this experiential session maps the discipline of expert tracking directly onto the decisions senior Asset Managers make every day. Working through the Tracking Success Pathway, participants will explore how to:

• Read weak signals early — recognise the faint precursors of failure long before they escalate into unplanned downtime, cost or a safety event.
• Separate signal from noise — distinguish a meaningful anomaly from the constant hum of alarms, KPIs and condition data, so scarce attention and resources go where they genuinely matter.
• Test assumptions under pressure — apply the tracker's habit of continually checking the story against the ground to failure modes, monitoring data and the "we've always done it this way" beliefs that quietly carry risk.
• Follow the trail through uncertainty — stay oriented when the evidence runs cold, the terrain changes or a plan meets a pressure test, and know when to hold course and when to reassess.
• Conserve energy and effort — spend maintenance capacity, capital and executive attention with the economy of a tracker who cannot afford a single wasted step.
• Align the team on one track — bring crews, planners and partners onto a single shared read of the situation, so everyone is following the same trail rather than their own.
• Close the gap with practical imagination — turn a partial picture into a confident, workable decision and execute it, rather than waiting for a certainty that never arrives.
• Lead with reverence and purpose — hold in mind the people, the assets and the responsibility you have been entrusted with, and do the work that matters.

Over four hours, Ian will draw the analogy between the split-second, high-stakes judgements of the bush and the complex, uncertain calls that define modern asset management. Participants will will leave with a shared language and a practical framework built on the mindsets of discernment, curiosity, agility, practical imagination and reverence, mapped directly onto the reality of leading maintenance and reliability at scale. Memorable, deeply practical, and designed exclusively for this group, The Tracker's Mind is built to change how senior Asset Managers read the ground beneath their most important decisions — and to get them to the track first.

Technical excellence alone won’t deliver sustained reliability. The maintenance and asset leaders who consistently outperform their peers do so by mastering something far harder than systems and tools. They master themselves, their people, and the organisational environment in which great maintenance happens. Strategy, culture, and capability are the real levers, and they sit firmly in the leader’s hands.

This workshop distils the core principles from a comprehensive leadership development programme into a practical, high-impact session designed for senior maintenance and asset leaders ready to elevate their influence and organisational performance.

• Self-awareness and leadership identity - understanding how your presence shapes those around you
• Emotional intelligence as a senior leadership discipline, not a soft skill
• Setting strategic direction that connects maintenance to enterprise value
• Building and sustaining a culture of reliability, ownership and continuous improvement
• Communicating, influencing and navigating complex organisational dynamics
• Leading safety at the organisational level - beyond compliance to commitment
• Driving performance, accountability and developing the next generation of leaders
• Managing complexity, competing priorities and your own sustainability as a leader

Whether you lead a team of supervisors or an entire asset management function, you will leave with sharper self-insight, practical frameworks, and a clear sense of where to focus your leadership energy to create lasting impact.

How do you make a strong safety culture stick — so it keeps improving and overcoming challenges long after the speaker has left the room?

The goal is safety sustainability. Theo coaches how to embed a continuously improving model where the safety culture isn't just maintained, but keeps addressing and overcoming new challenges over time. The foundation is simple but demanding: making Accountability and Personal Responsibility an entrenched, accepted practice at every level of the organisation.

• What Chronic Unease really means - Unpacking the "gloves between my knees" moment: the healthy, alert discomfort that keeps experienced people from becoming complacent.
• Safe vs. convenient - Why we so often obey that relentless voice urging us to "get the job done" instead of "do the job safely" - and how to recognise and override it in the moment.
• Extreme ownership and accountability - Introducing the OAR / BED model as a practical framework for taking full responsibility rather than slipping into blame, excuse or denial.
• Agreements written in blood - Building safety agreements your team genuinely commits to, paired with an accountability model that actually enforces them.
• Embedding it into the day-to-day (leadership session) - Your chosen Champions, Safety Partners, supervisors and managers work together to determine how best to integrate the Safety Agreements and Accountability Model into their existing "Safety Share" moments - so the change outlives the workshop.

In asset-intensive workplaces, we measure uptime, output, safety, cost, and risk - but often miss the human conditions that determine whether people speak up, contribute fully, and stay well.  

Drawing on my journey with a childhood speech disorder and my experience as an Engineering Manager at Opal, this session reframes workforce wellbeing as a measurable leadership discipline. In this session I will share how silence, hesitation, and difference can be misread in workplaces, and go on to introduce a practical L.A.S.T.I.N.G. framework leaders can use to build dignity, psychological safety, inclusion, and stronger people metrics.

Why people metrics can miss hidden workplace strain

• How silence and hesitation are misread

• Turning adversity into leadership insight

• Applying the L.A.S.T.I.N.G. workplace framework

• Measuring dignity, safety, inclusion, and voice

• Practical rituals leaders can implement immediately

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Modelling risk allows us to make robust and repeatable investment decisions. It supports us in communicating those decisions in a way that aligns to corporate strategy, gaining executive level buy-in to asset strategy. It provides our engineering experts data to support their intuition and decision-making. And focuses our data improvement activities and machine learning applications on the information we need most in our decision-making.

Why and how we model risk on our electricity assets

- How this modelling aligns to corporate Objectives and Key Results

- The way risk modelling provides support to our engineering experts' intuition

- The importance of data enablement in risk modelling

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Change is one of the hardest tests of leadership. Getting the structural and commercial decisions right is only half the job. The other half is bringing people with you through the uncertainty, emotion and disruption that follow.

In this case study, Andrew shares how he led a recent restructure of a maintenance and reliability team. He covers how he assessed the value and roles the team would need in future, handled the difficult conversations, supported people through the emotional impact, and then deliberately brought the team back together around a clear direction. Everyone offered a role in the new structure stayed.

The session explores how leaders can balance decisiveness with psychological safety. That means giving people space to process and respond while staying honest about decisions already made. It also looks at how clear communication, visible leadership, defined roles and a compelling strategic outlook help a technical team move through uncertainty, rebuild confidence and find a shared purpose after change.

Leadership through change: why leading change takes more than designing a new structure.

• Psychological and emotional safety: acknowledging the human impact of restructure and giving people respectful space to respond, ask questions and process it.

• Clarity in uncertainty: saying what is changing, why, and what happens next, so uncertainty doesn’t linger.

• Moving from disruption to direction: explaining the new structure, reporting lines, strategic pillars and outlook as early as possible.

• Rebuilding the team: giving new managers and the wider maintenance and reliability team chances to reconnect and form new working relationships.

• Retention through change: how structure, certainty and clear direction kept the maintenance and reliability capability the business needed.  

• The leader as the face of change: making and owning hard decisions rather than seeking to be liked. As Andrew puts it: “leadership’s hard, get ready for it.”

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Companies are expected to eliminate and/or control psychosocial hazards from impacting the wellbeing of employees (ISO 45003). Ensuring that all employees actively contribute to improving performance is an outcome of the proactive protection of psychological wellbeing by companies, leaders and team members. The future of work will demand it.

• The emergence of ISO 45003

• We live in a VUCA world (volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity)

• The need for protecting psychological wellbeing

• The link between psychological wellbeing and continuous improvement

• The role of organisations and leaders in protecting psychological wellbeing as a moral and economic imperative

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The Public Transport Authority (PTA) in Western Australia faced a familiar challenge: how do you retain skilled people when competing against Mining organisations offering salaries you simply can’t match? The team joked that they didn’t want to remain the “Pilbara Training Academy” — developing great people only to lose them to higher-paying employers. Rather than compete on salary, they decided to compete on culture.

They also challenged their traditional approach to recruitment. The experienced, perfectly qualified track inspectors they were searching for were effectively “unicorns” — candidates who rarely existed or, when they did, could command salaries the PTA couldn’t offer.

Instead, the team built capability from within: recruiting for potential and transferable skills, providing structured training and qualifications, creating different career pathways, offering flexible working arrangements and, importantly, treating people as individuals.

This session explores a simple lesson: when you can’t win the salary war, culture, development and opportunity can become your competitive advantage.

How we have retained people during Metronet and with higher salaries up North in the mining industry.

• Opportunities we have provided people (acting, training, courses etc.)

• Hiring for potential, cultural fit and transferable skills rather than qualifications, and then upskilling.

• Looking after our people.

• The success of the Trainee Track Inspector program etc.

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In this riveting keynote, one of Africa’s most renowned lion and tracking experts takes you out of the boardroom and into the bush.

In the wild, the signs are always there: a broken branch, a fresh track, a sudden silence. The ones who thrive read them early, adapt fast and move as one. The same is true on a plant floor.

Former African safari guide and adventurer, Ian Schubach, brings the lessons of the wild to maintenance and reliability. Using the habits and behaviours of lions, elephants, leopards and giraffes, he shows how leaders can build adaptable, proactive cultures that strengthen collaboration, improve reliability and stay ahead of pressure, complexity and change.

Expect gripping stories, hard-won lessons and a new way of seeing your team that will stay with you long after you leave the room.

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Shutdowns exist to take risk out of the business. Yet the way we prepare, plan and execute them can put new risk straight back in. Every shutdown carries known and unknown risks. The job is to find and manage them, deliver the work safely and on budget, and hand back a stable platform for operations.

Too often, a finished schedule is mistaken for a shutdown that is ready to execute. Planning is essential, but it is not preparation. When preparation is incomplete, workflows are inefficient, teams are misaligned or reporting fails to show what matters, the result is mediocrity disguised as progress.

In this 90-minute interactive masterclass, drawing on practical shutdown experience, John will explore:

• Preparation vs planning: why a schedule alone doesn’t make a shutdown ready

• The risk paradox: how shutdowns can introduce the very risks they are meant to remove

• The warning signs: incomplete preparation, inefficient workflows, misaligned teams and reporting that hides the truth

• Bringing it together: how people, processes, tools and analysis combine to improve readiness and remove uncertainty

• Live audience insight: the room’s own shutdown practices, polled and analysed in real time to reveal common issues

• What good looks like: practical ideas to strengthen readiness and execution

Participants won’t just hear about shutdown readiness. They will see the room’s answers analysed live, compare views with peers, and leave with practical ideas to challenge conventional thinking and deliver shutdowns that remove risk rather than create it.

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The need to set funds aside for maintenance was recognised as far back as 395 AD. Eusebius, who was the equivalent of Treasurer to Emperor Arcadius, sent out a memo to all Provincial Administrators to the effect that, “In order that the splendid cities and towns may not fall into ruins through age, we assign a third part of the income from the farms belonging to a municipality to be used for the repair of public works and the heating of baths.”

Maintenance practitioners would instinctively applaud this approach, but upon reflection, we should question the logic of allocating a specific fraction of income to carrying out maintenance. Is it enough? Too much? Is the cost of maintenance really linked to income? What happens in good-harvest years, and bad?  

Sixteen hundred years later, we may still not be asking the right questions, nor backing our fund allocations with a logical approach.  

In this Master Class, we’ll combine some engineering methods with a few business management principles and add a dash of common sense that will put us on a path that is better than “Last year’s costs plus CPI plus 15%, because we know the boss will tell us to cut by 10%”.

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We are reimagining Root Cause Analysis for the AI era by transforming RCA from a manual, workshop-heavy process into a smarter, evidence-led workflow.  

By using AI as a co-facilitator, our application helps organise and synthesise evidence, build a factual sequence of events, identify missing information and generate an evidence-based cause tree for SME challenge.

The multidisciplinary team remains at the centre, applying technical judgement and making final decisions. AI accelerates the process while people own the outcome.

1. Why RCA needs redesign for the AI era

2. Moving from workshop-heavy RCA to AI-accelerated workflows

3. Using AI as an RCA co-facilitator

4. Demonstrating the application: evidence, timelines and cause trees

5. Identifying missing evidence against emerging cause pathways

6. Ensuring human ownership, governance and SME challenge

It started as just another day. Then 22,000 volts of electricity surged through Theo's body as he worked on live powerlines - an accident that all but ended his life.

Theo speaks candidly about the three days he spent in hospital waiting to die, and the desperate fight to survive that followed - physically and mentally - long after the event itself. As he speaks, a slideshow projects the reality of that day: his horrific injuries, the toll on his family, and the long, slow road back to recovery.

This is a story told without filters. It is hard-hitting, deeply personal, and carries a safety message that lands in a way no policy or procedure ever could. Theo's decision to spend the rest of his life talking about safety - and sharing his story with as many people as possible - stems directly from the near-fatal moment that almost took everything from him.

Management, supervisors and, most importantly, your workforce will walk away seeing safety in a completely different light. It's a presentation that inspires, unsettles and stays with everyone who witnesses it.

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Many organisations operate with asset criticality classifications that were never truly evaluated - inherited through ERP migrations, copied from legacy systems, or assigned without structured methodology. The result is predictable: flawed maintenance prioritisation, reactive planning, and inventory strategies built on assumption rather than evidence.

We faced this challenge at scale. With thousands of assets incorrectly classified in our ERP, minor components were competing with major production-critical equipment for maintenance attention, planner bandwidth, and spare parts investment. The system wasn't just inefficient - it was actively working against us.

In response, we designed and implemented a dynamic, data-driven Equipment Criticality Analysis (ECA) program from the ground up. The work involved cleansing and reassessing over 9,000 asset lines, integrating failure mode modelling, and building a live Power BI visualisation layer - enabling real-time, value-based decision-making at both the planning and execution level.

The outcomes have been significant and measurable. Maintenance teams can now prioritise work with confidence, anchored to production value and quantified downtime risk rather than historical habit. Shutdown planners make faster, better-informed trade-offs when scope conflicts arise. And critically, the ECA outputs have reshaped our inventory strategy - driving targeted investment in high-risk critical spares while identifying and eliminating substantial volumes of obsolete stock, delivering clear financial returns.

Job plan improvement is a chicken-and-egg problem. Trades don’t read job plans because they are not useful as written. Planners don’t improve them because craft don’t read them. AI used wrong will bury the problem in words.

Across multiple U.S. plants in varied industries, we have built Execution References based on best-practice learnings from aviation, medicine, nuclear, and other leading industries.

This session shows what changes when the document is worth reading.  

• The stall between trades, planners and feedback, and where it breaks  

• The Execution Reference: written so that the person holding the spanner would use it  

• Trades review without the author in the room, and what it caught  

• Shutdown findings routed back into the last wave of references  

• Planners as custodians of a reference library  

Peter J. Munson has nearly 30 years’ experience in maintenance and operations, beginning his career as a Marine Corps KC-130 pilot and maintenance officer. He held leadership roles across maintenance, operations and general management before moving into heavy industry, working across refining, chemicals, utilities and mining.  Peter holds Certified Reliability Engineer (CRE), Certified Maintenance and Reliability Professional (CMRP) and Certified Reliability Leader (CRL) credentials. He is also the author of The Maintenance Execution Gap.

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MAINSTREAM’s 2027 research found every room already knows what good maintenance looks like, yet many strategy programs still spend a year or more in FMEA workshops before a single task changes.

In a 120-day program at four US industrial minerals plants, finishing in January, we are taking another road.  

Public standards, manufacturer guidance, and established best practice give us all we need to rapidly create craft-focused execution references for improved preventive strategies.

Focusing on clear acceptance criteria and a closed findings-to-remediation loop enables far more learning and optimisation than up-front reliability analysis ever achieves.

Attendees screen a sample of their own PM records to identify how they can achieve rapid improvement.    

Why more analysis has not moved reliability in four decades  
• Execution References built from standards, OEM guidance and established practice  
• Reviewing the highest-impact third with engineering and craft together  
• Templates per task and equipment type, configured to each site  
• Acceptance criteria and coded close-out as evidence for each revision  
• Hands-on: screening a sample of your own PM records  

Peter J. Munson has nearly 30 years’ experience in maintenance and operations, beginning his career as a Marine Corps KC-130 pilot and maintenance officer. He held leadership roles across maintenance, operations and general management before moving into heavy industry, working across refining, chemicals, utilities and mining.  Peter holds Certified Reliability Engineer (CRE), Certified Maintenance and Reliability Professional (CMRP) and Certified Reliability Leader (CRL) credentials. He is also the author of The Maintenance Execution Gap.  

A reliable plant is one where equipment keeps performing its required function, and major shutdowns are where reliability is protected or lost. Many of the people doing the work come from outside the organisation and need the guidance of a formalised process to preserve that function. When we introduced a formalised QAQC process with internal ownership, the learning flow was high, but the knowledge stock stayed informal and personal. Without a deliberate mechanism to institutionalise it, that learning risked leaving with the team. This session shows how we built it and are turning one successful event into organisational memory.

• Reliability links to the QAQC process in major shutdowns
• Consolidating a process that captures people's intuition and experience to find gaps
• Using reliability assessments to build an achievable strategy
• Connecting people to the process through leadership and safe, honest reporting
• Refreshing old routines and building an owned knowledge record
• Making every shutdown build on the last with built-in contribution and consultation

Three key take-aways include:

1. Reliability is protected by embedded process, not by individuals. Keep what your teams know in an owned record, so plant reliability stays consistent as people and teams change.

2. A reliable plant depends on honest reporting. Leadership and a safe reporting culture decide whether you find the real gaps or only confirm what looks good.

3. Lasting reliability comes from a system that keeps learning. Regular checkpoints for adding, reusing and questioning knowledge turn a good result into a lasting habit.

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Many organisations begin a reliability journey with energy, but struggle to sustain momentum once leadership changes, budgets tighten, or operational pressure returns.

This session shows how Cargill has kept Maintenance & Reliability visible, relevant, and supported across multiple locations for more than two decades.

Using real examples, Walter will explain how four simple plant-level indicators help translate maintenance performance into business language, engage senior leaders, and move sites from reactive firefighting toward proactive reliability.

Attendees will leave with a practical approach they can apply in their own business.

• Why reliability journeys lose momentum after the first push

• How to define and recognise a proactive maintenance culture

• The 4 indicators that explain plant reliability performance

• How leading indicators create better leadership conversations

• How to turn KPI reviews into action

• How to implement the model across multiple sites

Three take-aways from the session include:

1. How to secure and sustain senior leadership support for reliability

2. How to measure plant reliability with four practical indicators

3. How to use KPIs to shift culture from reactive to proactive

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Most organisations believe maintenance success starts with perfect planning. In reality, no plan survives contact with day-to-day operations.

The differentiator is not planning quality but scheduling discipline and adherence.  
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Drawing on practical experience across multiple sites, Walter will demonstrate why successful work execution depends on protecting the weekly schedule, deliberately loading resources beyond planned demand to absorb uncertainty, and aggressively managing schedule breakers.  

Attendees will learn how to define what work belongs on the schedule, who has authority to change it, how to measure compliance, and how to create a culture where the schedule becomes the primary execution tool.  

• Why good planning alone does not improve execution  
• The difference between planning effectiveness and scheduling discipline  
• Why maintenance organisations should intentionally overload schedules  
• Identifying and eliminating recurring schedule breakers  
• Governance: who can change the weekly schedule  
• Measuring schedule adherence and execution performance  

Three take-aways from the session include:  

1. How to build a schedule-driven maintenance organisation  

2. How to manage uncertainty without destroying execution discipline  

3. How to measure and improve schedule adherence sustainably  

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A 90-minute interactive masterclass with internationally renowned lubrication expert and speaker, Rafe Britton.

Designed specifically for professionals in mining and power generation, this practical masterclass explores how to transform underperforming lubrication programs into sustainable, high-performing operations.

Rafe will challenge conventional thinking, demonstrating why lasting improvements go beyond better lubricants and equipment. The real transformation comes from people, processes, accountability and cultural change.

Key themes include:

• Why programs lose momentum: Tackling workforce challenges, skills gaps, knowledge retention and upskilling.

• Measuring success: Using the ICML 55 framework to assess lubrication program health.

• Solving industry challenges: Identifying and addressing critical asset-specific and operational issues.

• Making maintenance work: Turning generic preventive maintenance into clear, actionable tasks.

• Closing the loop: Connecting condition monitoring insights with maintenance action.

• Embedding lasting change: Making improvements achievable, measurable and sustainable.

• Interactive workshop: Your 90-Day Improvement Plan

Put learning into action by developing a practical, prioritised roadmap to strengthen your lubrication program.

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Join us for our closing networking cocktail party! We'll announce prize winners - including the chance to attend MAINSTREAM in the UK in October- and toast to a successful day over drinks and canapés. The perfect opportunity to connect with the community before we wrap up.