A message from your E&I leaders, Feb '23

Hello and welcome to the first edition of On the Wire for 2023.

This is my first edition writing an update about what’s happening in our business unit which includes our E&I team nationally as well as our operations in Mongolia.

Going forward both myself and Iain Hannant will provide a shared leadership update, so I hope you enjoy this new structure. We are always open to feedback about what you’d like to hear more or less of!

It’s now been a month post the Christmas break, including for those on roster who should have now had a chance to get some RnR. So, I hope everyone has had time to rest, recover and reset for the big year ahead.

What lies ahead of us for the year? Currently there’s a massive amount of tendering for SMPE&I projects nationally; additional scopes of work in Mongolia; and a number of large-scale minerals processing sector projects such as rare earth, gold and copper which are presenting unique opportunities to our typically iron ore centric portfolio. It’s an interesting shift and it’s important that we put our best foot forward to capitalise on these opportunities.

I’m headed to Mongolia this week for the first time. I’m looking forward to spending time with the team in Ulaanbaatar and Oyu Tolgoi (OT). I’m fortunate to visit while Mongolia is having a consistently hot spell of minus 15 degrees! The OT project is however heating up now, reaching the back end of mobilisations and starting to make momentum in the construction phase.

I similarly look forward to getting out and about to our other operations on the east and west of Australia to meet more of you, which I’ll be doing over the next few months.

For those of you unfamiliar with me, I have begrudgingly agreed to include a profile on myself for this edition so you can get to know me and my experience a little more. A key takeaway from it I’d like to reiterate is what is most important to me, and the reason I have remained at Monos for 16 years is our Company values – I feel strongly aligned to these, with safety and wellbeing the top most important. Cliché I know, but my driver is to make sure that we all look after each other.

We are in this game together, and it’s my goal that we all return home safe and healthy after each break / day of work. To do so, we need to all care for each other.

I’ll hand you over to Hanno for the operational update below.

Operational update from Operations Manager, Iain Hannant

The safe steady start to 2023 has seen us pick up from where we left off late last year, injury free. This is a credit to everyone involved helping manage the higher risk environment leading into Christmas and slingshotting into the new year maintaining a high focus even through the “back to work blues” period. Well done.

With a new year, comes new opportunities, and the tendering teams are flat out trying to secure the next round of projects which are hopefully just around the corner. Couple these with some ongoing early contractor involvements (ECIs), the teams will be looking forward to a short breather soon.

On site at Iron Bridge, the team continues to ramp up its resourcing through the brutally consistent 45-degree days, as the work fronts open up from the platform SMP have laid. Still, plenty of scope there and hopefully our customer recognises the team’s continuous success in reaching critical milestones safely with some additional work through the cooler Pilbara winter months.

The team at Tallison Greenbushes is also starting to ramp up with work fronts opening up all over the plot so they can now capitalise on the early preparation works which has put then in a good position. They have a solid push right to the finish, and the team assembled should have no issues achieving the milestones in place.

With the two projects mentioned above ramping up, it is a good time to pay my dues to recruitment. They have been tirelessly looking for electricians, day in, day out, to support the project schedules and without their effort, the site teams could not be as successful as they have to date. A big thank you to the recruitment teams as electricians are not a commodity readily available in this current climate and will be continuing to be a challenge to recruit moving forward.

Over to Gladstone where they continue to tick along keeping customers happy by executing their works to a high standard and most importantly, safely. The QAL North Decant Project is commencing, led by Clint Doherty who has also taken WA based Electrical Graduate (Scott Hughes) under his wing for the project. Scott will no doubt return to WA on completion of the project, a different person!

The Perth office has also welcomed two new E&I Graduates Engineers this week, and as usual they will be at the mercy of Kevin McGarry for the first few months learning the basics. A huge welcome to Vladimir Smudja and Graeme Roger, I hope you enjoy your Monadelphous journey.

That’s a wrap for this month so, stay safe and look out for each other.