IQA NEWS SELF-REFLECTION SEES EVERYONE A WINNER AT IQA AWARDS The IQA has a way of finding the industry’s best and brightest, even when they’re as humble and unassuming as Chris Hamilton. As a winner of not one but two IQA Awards, he is just one example of the industry’s quiet achievers.
Chris Hamilton (right) receives the 2015 Weir Minerals Young Members Award.
W
ith the annual IQA Conference and Awards on the horizon – in Newcastle, New South Wales on 29 to 31 March, 2022 – nominations will close for all eight awards on 18 January. Once finalists are locked in, the winner will be announced in front of hundreds of industry peers and mentors, which Chris Hamilton knows to be an honour and a privilege. He was lucky enough to win Awards in consecutive years – the 2014 Caterpillar Continuous Improvement Award, and the 2015 Weir Minerals Young Members Award, both of which recognised his mountains of work. Both Hamilton’s awards – and indeed all current IQA Awards – recognise a unique set of attributes in their nominees, making them all the more important to those holding the certificate on stage. The Continuous Improvement Award was bestowed for an individual’s contribution to improving an Australian extractive business through continuous improvement.
50
Quarry January 2022
At the time of the awards, Hamilton was one of Holcim’s operations improvement managers for national aggregates and was in his ninth year with the company. It was a role that led Hamilton to spearhead a major heavy mobile equipment fleet management program which saw his team shuffle 100 pieces of equipment across Holcim Australia’s quarry portfolio. The process took about 12 months and involved 40 different sites across the country. Hamilton explained the process required a number of different pieces to come together, including telemetry, on-board information and right-sizing fleets through a holistic approach. “Typically, a site has a number of loaders, a digger and a couple of trucks, and each quarry seems the same as the next,” he told Quarry. “But upon a closer look, you realise if you swap a digger from here and a loader from there, you can find benefits for several sites at once.” The year-long program involved several onsite, physical reviews for Holcim’s larger sites.
Hamilton said the program found multiple benefits for the company by the time he and his team were through with it. “We performed activity cost analyses to understand where we were struggling, where we had high idle time versus high utilisation, and then implemented the program to improve costs and productivity across the business,” he said. Of course, as is his nature, Hamilton said no such program or resulting award could be accomplished without a supportive environment and capable colleagues. “A lot of the awards look like and are individual awards per se. But to execute anything to win an award – be it in management, safety, continuous improvement or whichever – it is a team effort,” Hamilton said. “It involves working in an industry and for an organisation that believes in continuous improvement. You can’t execute projects if the company doesn’t believe in it. “Then, to be successful you have to earn it in showing that those initiatives are working and making a positive difference to the business.”
‘NO SUBMISSION IS A BAD ONE’ To make a strong submission for the IQA Awards, and to show your work in the industry is worthy of recognition, a suitable amount of effort should be spent, according to Hamilton. While the 10-plus hours he spent working on his submission may not be viable for some, he stressed the importance of putting your best foot forward. “You don’t want to submit something that took 45 minutes to type up. You should want to submit something you’re really proud of because you’re representing yourself and your organisation,” Hamilton said. Also important to consider, for those unsure whether to nominate themselves – or indeed others – is the experience of recognising the
