International engineering company AMEC Minproc is looking to expand its staff complement in Johannesburg, South Africa, as work gradually increases.

In the wake of the financial crisis, the company’s staff contingent has been reduced to a core complement of employees, says AMEC Minproc Africa operations MD Colin Kubank. However, mining opportunities are starting to improve, and the company will be expanding as they do.

He says that junior mining companies are investing in discovering new deposits and are, thereby, creating feasibility study opportunities. As a result, the company has found it necessary to retool itself and adjust its focus from executing projects to conducting feasibility studies. However, he expects that these feasibility opportunities will develop into executable projects in the next 6 to 12 months.

Kubank says that the company also expects opportunities in uranium, particularly in Nambia, where, over the past few years, it has completed a number of uranium studies and a uranium project.

Small to medium-sized gold projects are also emerging throughout Africa, particularly in West Africa, where the company expects to win work. Another area of potential growth for AMEC Minproc is the copper market as Kubank says there are a number of small to medium-sized projects coming to the fore, particularly in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Besides these commodities, the company is also looking to expand into coal and iron-ore projects.

He says that, while the company would like to win more contracts in South Africa, this is challenging owing to the competitive market and the country’s well-established local players. He believes that, as a result of AMEC Minproc’s ability to work in remote parts of Africa, it has tended to focus more on those areas – on projects that are, in some instances, more logistically challenging.

Skills Pool
Kubank believes that its competitors have felt the same skills pinch as AMEC Minproc, finding a limited resource pool of technical and project management talent. “We are all fishing from the same pond and tend to poach from one another, depending on the workload,” he says.

New employees are trained in the use of AMEC Minproc’s own engineering and project management delivery system. Once they have been trained, it stands them in good stead for other engineering and project management opportunities, says Kubank.

He explains that being part of interna- tional engineering and project management services provider AMEC offers an advantage to AMEC Minproc in that it is a global company with over 21 000 people employed in more than 40 countries.

“An employee of AMEC Minproc is exposed to the broader AMEC organisation and there are career opportunities around the world,” he says, adding that this is a significant advantage in terms of attracting highly superior employees to the group.

Mining Weekly previously reported that AMEC acquired GRD Minproc in November 2009, and the new entity, AMEC Minproc, is expanding its client base within the mining sector.

Most employees in the local office are South African and, while he says that there is a desire to keep local content as high as possible, the company recruits specialist skills from other countries when they cannot be sourced locally.

Safety Success
Meanwhile, AMEC Minproc achieved a lost-time injury frequency rate (LTIFR) of about 0,9 for one-million work hours at the Tenke Fungurume copper/cobalt project, in the Katanga province of the DRC – the company’s biggest project to date.

Kubank says that the low LTIFR is a credit to the company given the project’s remote location, the time constraints for completion and the range of different nationalities and cultures comprising its workforce.

In 2007, GRD Minproc was awarded the engineering, procurement and construction management contract for the project by copper, gold and molybdenum producer Freeport-McMoRan Copper & Gold.

“The project involved the construction and commissioning of a copper/cobalt processing plant with a yearly nameplate capacity of 140 000 t of copper and 8 000 t of cobalt,” he says.

Kubank says that the project was successful and the ramp-up was exceptionally fast in that, after construction had been completed, the mine was running at nameplate capacity just three months after commissioning.

Health and Safety
Further, AMEC has a strong focus on health and safety and Kubank says that the company tries to keep it uppermost in the minds of its employees through beha- viour-based observational programmes. A policy of intervention is employed where workers are encouraged to stop others from continuing actions that are considered unsafe or potentially injurious, to talk them through the potential safety hazards involved and restart the job with a safe plan of action in place.

He attributes the company’s low LTIFRs to “getting the health and safety culture right” and to its top-down approach to a health and safety culture.

To subscribe to Mining Weekly's print magazine email subscriptions@creamermedia.co.za or buy now.