Toronto Maintenance Management Conference Covers Hot Topics

Creating A 21st Century Maintenance Organization, a Federated Press conference held in Mississauga Sept. 27-29, 2004, attracted over 60 delegates who heard more than 25 maintenance and plant engineering experts in various presentations and seminars.

Topics covered at the conference included: Redefining the role of maintenance management for the 21st century; Linking maintenance strategy to business goals; The use of Six Sigma, Lean Manufacturing and TPM concepts in maintenance departments; Maintenance benchmarking audits; Dealing with Ontario’s Bill C-45 safety legislation; and Improving equipment reliability with CMMS systems.

A keynote presentation, “Why Bad Things Happened To Good Maintenance People,” was presented by Mark R. Goldstein, Ph.D., of Manufacturing and Maintenance InfoSource. Two of Machinery & Equipment MRO’s regular contributors, Simon Fridlyand and Cliff Williams, also were speakers at the conference.

The event included the presentation of the Federated Press Lifetime Achievement Award in Plant Engineering & Maintenance to Steve F. Krar of Kelmar Associates, Welland, Ont.

Krar has 45 years of educational and industrial research experience with emphasis on machine tools and manufacturing technology, has spent 21 years teaching machine trades and 10 years on the technical teacher training summer staff for the Ontario College of Education at the University of Toronto. He co-ordinated and co-authored 75 books with translations in four languages and sales over 1.6 million copies.

Krar was educational chairman of the Ontario Vocational Education Association for six years and has set up and coordinated 25 new technological courses for educators with industries in the United States and Canada.

He has been a member and chairman of the Machine Tool Trades Advisory Committee at Niagara College in St. Catharines, Ont., is a Life Member of the Society of Manufacturing Engineers, and has served on other posts too numerous to list here.