Case study: Optimizing operations and tracking progress

Founded in 1988, Cameco Corporation, headquartered in Saskatchewan, Canada, is the world’s largest publicly traded uranium company — and one of the global leaders in uranium production. Cameco produces uranium to fuel nuclear reactors in Canada and internationally. It owns mines, mills, and fuel production facilities in Canada, the United States, and Kazakhstan. The Cigar Lake Mine site, located in northern Saskatchewan, began commercial operation in 2015. It employs some 530 staff and contractors and has repeatedly received safety awards.

Initially, the Cigar Lake Mine site was looking for one solution to a fundamental problem: a fast and easy way to pull multiple documents from multiple sources and have them all printed out with the work order from SAP. Collating these documents ensured maintenance teams were best prepared before commencing maintenance work.

However, after implementing Prometheus planning and scheduling for their enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, SAP, they quickly realized they could use the solutions to overcome other challenges. For instance, they were managing the status of materials and components or producing compliance reports to regulatory bodies. 

Overall, Prometheus Group unlocked new ways to create efficiencies while maintaining or exceeding their already high standards for safety, environmental protection, quality, and accuracy.

REQUIREMENTS

• Collecting maintenance documents from various sources to print with the work orders to better equip their maintenance crews

• Gaining visibility into the interdependencies between jobs on and off the critical path  

• Simplifying and streamlining daily tasks with user-friendly dashboards, tools, and functions that put an end to repetitive data entry work  

• Forecasting planned outages as well as regular maintenance activities  

The Cigar Lake site has used Prometheus planning and scheduling for SAP since 2012. They fully leverage the powerful Navigator [now Dashboard] and enjoy how it drastically simplifies SAP for work management. Now, all the maintenance supervisors have their own configured Navigator that acts as their cockpit for business management. 

It has become so popular that it has extended outside of the maintenance team and into many operations groups. The operations teams leverage [Dashboard] for work request approvals, backlog reviews on their assets, and even auto-generating regulatory inspection reports.

Another area where Cameco has found time-saving efficiencies and improved accuracy is by leveraging material shopping cart. Floor-level and front-level supervisors use it to locate materials and components, see in real-time what is and is not in stock, and add materials to work orders while continuing to execute work.

“You don’t have to use wildcards. You don’t have to get your search terms in the exact right order or the perfect wording,” said Kris Halland, senior planner of maintenance at Cameco. “Material Shopping Cart saves you time and frustration by consolidating SAP searches into one function. It’s about as close to a Google search as you can get.”

Most recently, they have started working with Prometheus Group’s Extended Functionalities (XF) package to track, manage, and forecast maintenance shutdowns and turnarounds. Previously, it was a challenge to identify and monitor the maintenance tasks along the critical path, as well as “float” work that could potentially interfere with completing the shutdown on time.

When Cameco adopted the Prometheus Group solutions, they had a small scope of goals they wanted to achieve. Since implementing the tools, they’ve achieved a range of process improvements, created numerous efficiencies, and enhanced what their planners and schedulers can do.

Cameco staff are saving many hours in the day by streamlining planning and scheduling processes – without sacrificing the quality of work. Prometheus Planning & Scheduling is designed to take labor-intensive, repetitive tasks and automate them. 

“It can be time-consuming to do tasks such as entering selection criteria for SAP variants,” said Halland.“But now we can do that in just one click. Or for example, scheduling 200 work orders. Where that used to take 20 minutes, now I can do that in under 30 seconds with the mass change function. And all these small-time savings add up to a lot of hours re-gained that we can spend more productively.”

The various teams now have clear visibility into maintenance work on and off the critical path. This means supervisors can proactively anticipate issues before timelines are derailed. As Halland noted, “We can keep track of the forest and the trees.” Teams have the visibility they need to monitor schedules and individual jobs in their own context but quickly and easily see how they fit into the bigger picture of next week, next month, and so on. 

The visual way that planning and scheduling presents data enables planners, schedulers, supervisors, and even maintenance technicians to understand the working relationships between various jobs – rather than seeing jobs in isolation. Understanding these interdependencies means they can coordinate, sequence, and execute work effectively so that work is always done in the right order at the right time.

Maintenance supervisors use the solutions to do work assignments and dispatching, using the drag-and-drop functionality. “It’s possible to do some of this work in other tools, but it isn’t always fast or intuitive. The Prometheus Group solutions opened up new avenues for us,” said Halland.

Cameco has big goals, and Kris and his team are committed to continuous improvement. They continue exploring new ways to improve their processes and leverage every feature of planning and scheduling for SAP. 

designed to take labor-intensive, repetitive tasks and automate them. 

“It can be time-consuming to do tasks such as entering selection criteria for SAP variants,” said Halland.“But now we can do that in just one click. Or for example, scheduling 200 work orders. Where that used to take 20 minutes, now I can do that in under 30 seconds with the mass change function. And all these small-time savings add up to a lot of hours re-gained that we can spend more productively.”

The various teams now have clear visibility into maintenance work on and off the critical path. This means supervisors can proactively anticipate issues before timelines are derailed. As Halland noted, “We can keep track of the forest and the trees.” Teams have the visibility they need to monitor schedules and individual jobs in their own context but quickly and easily see how they fit into the bigger picture of next week, next month, and so on. 

The visual way that planning and scheduling presents data enables planners, schedulers, supervisors, and even maintenance technicians to understand the working relationships between various jobs – rather than seeing jobs in isolation. Understanding these interdependencies means they can coordinate, sequence, and execute work effectively so that work is always done in the right order at the right time.

Maintenance supervisors use the solutions to do work assignments and dispatching, using the drag-and-drop functionality. “It’s possible to do some of this work in other tools, but it isn’t always fast or intuitive. The Prometheus Group solutions opened up new avenues for us,” said Halland.

Cameco has big goals, and Kris and his team are committed to continuous improvement. They continue exploring new ways to improve their processes and leverage every feature of planning and scheduling for SAP. And when they have questions, they know help is just a phone call away. 

“Prometheus Group has ‘old-fashioned’ customer relations — in a good way,” said Halland. “When we need something, we don’t have to submit a ticket and wait through a long, drawn-out process to solve a simple problem. I pick up the phone, and there’s someone to help. The Prometheus Group team is there, ready to have those conversations.”  

“We’ve seen a massive number of small improvements across all areas that add up to huge time savings. For instance, with one-click scheduling, what used to take 20 minutes now takes 30 seconds. Suddenly, you have more time to get more done and to do an even better job.” said Halland.