Neil Bruce, president of Resources, Environment and Water for SNC Lavalin, has almost reached the first anniversary of his new job, but looks and sounds as if it were his 10th. Looking only slightly incongruous with the bare brick walls and varnished wood floors of his trendy London office, he exudes the pragmatism you’d expect of a Scots engineer who has weathered decades in the international energy sector.
He has worked in the mining, nuclear, power and environmental sectors, but says oil and gas has always been central to his career and calls it his “home” sector. His first job was on the original hook up of Brent Charlie for Shell as a graduate, “structural punch listing” - listing things that weren’t complete and getting them completed, an experience he describes as a “hell of an introduction to the industry”.
At the start of 2013, Bruce surprised many in the industry by joining SNC Lavalin, Canada’s largest engineering and construction company. Surprising because he had been with previous employer Amec for 15 years and because SNC Lavalin is struggling to shake off damage from allegations of bribery and corruption involving its senior executives.
SNC Lavalin’s share price plummeted when the corruption cases, which center around Libya and payments made, first surfaced two years ago. Other potential cases, such as a bridge project in Bangladesh and a hospital project in Quebec, Canada, have since emerged and the individuals involved, including the former CEO, are facing charges.
The fallout has been substantial. As a result of the bridge project a SNC Lavalin subsidiary and all its affiliates have been banned from bidding on World Bank projects for 10 years. It was reported earlier this year that after the company initiated a three month amnesty on corrupt practices and fraud that 32 employees admitted minor ethical violations, none of which were new.
It’s still not certain if the company itself will face any corruption charges, but Bruce is satisfied that the appropriate remedial action has been taken and that the company’s senior management is operating transparently. He even raises the possibility that SNC Lavalin may sue the individuals concerned once they have been prosecuted.
SNC Lavalin’s response was a company-wide ethics and compliance program, a major organisational restructuring including a major management shake up and a new strategy that moves the company away from its Canadian roots to increase its global reach. “It’s been an opportunity to bring in people with different experiences,” says Bruce. “Before it was a very French Canadian management team. I’m the first person on the executive committee that is not based in Canada. For a global organisation we need global experience. That means people outside of Montreal.”
The new Resources Group, which operates in the oil and gas, mining, environmental and water sectors and is headed up Bruce, is a major part of that strategy. It is spearheading SNC Lavalin’s globalisation strategy and is planned to be the main source for revenue growth - the target is to double revenue in five years. Bruce says: “We’re still 60% Canadian and Resources is the vehicle to push that out. The infrastructure and power side is very much focussed on expanding in North and South America.”
While Bruce provides SNC Lavalin management with broader international experience, the company presents a wider set of sectors for Bruce to operate in, primarily its large infrastructure and power business. SNC Lavalin assets include the CANDU nuclear reactor technology, which it purchased from the Canadian government, and Altalink, Alberta’s electricity grid. It’s rail portfolio includes the Airport to Downtown Vancouver “Canada Line”. The firm also owns UK-based rail consultancy Interfleet, the biggest customer of which is British infrastructure owner and operator Network Rail.
However, Bruce says that management experience from his career on energy projects transfers easily into different sectors in the contractor space. “It’s always about putting talented teams together, organising effectively, managing the customer and community relationships. Also, ensuring engineering excellence standards is vital.” he says.
Ensuring engineering excellence is an easier thing for a global Engineering and Construction company to say than do. Even more so when you are a sprawling multinational firm unable to ensure its employees and partners are doing business in an ethical way. So, in addition to heading up the Resources Group, Bruce’s second task since joining SNC Lavalin in January has been to examine the company’s efficiency improvement program. One of the program’s key aims is to ensure that company has the base systems, tools and appropriately skilled skilled people to become better and more efficient.
Somewhat candidly, Bruce admits that SNC Lavalin’s project management system, known as PM Plus, needs a refresh. “There is an excellent, internally developed, project management system, but it’s not consistently applied across the company. Pockets use it, but large bits don’t. We are standardising - anything that doesn’t need to be different won’t be different,” he says. The philosophy extends to things like the use of 3D CAD systems. The use of one software package throughout the company makes it easier to manage global licences, improves interoperability between projects and locations and makes training easier. “The benefits quickly stack up,” he says.
Despite organisational introspection over management processes and management shakeups to limit reputational damage from corruption allegations, SNC Lavalin’s project list is diverse and busy. The Resources Group has a presence in 40 countries. There are mining developments in Brazil and Colombia, the US, Northern Canada, Africa, Australia and China. The company is involved in oil and gas projects in Russia, Venezuela, Colombia, Abu Dhabi, Saudi Arabia, the UK, Norway, Oil Sands in North East Canada.
Growth for the Resources Group, says Bruce, will come from Canada, Europe and the Middle East. “The Middle East is a huge area for us,” he says. “The domestic Canadian market is obviously important to us: oil sands, east coast Canada and LNG facilities on the West Coast. Asia is important more for mining. There are longer term ambitions for oil and gas in Asia.”
Bruce says the firm’s main USP, and one that is important in places like the Middle East and Africa, is that it can offer transport infrastructure such as roads, rails and ports, alongside oil and gas and mining facilities. “Some countries aren’t looking for companies to go in a drill a few wells. They want the wells, the infrastructure, a fertiliser plant and all these other things tied into that. We can deliver a solution for all these things.”
The company is involved in the project management of the construction of the Riyadh Metro in Saudi Arabia. It has around 600 people in the country and is one of four firms with a General Engineering Service Plus (GES+) contract with Saudi Aramco. GES+ contracts aim to develop engineering capability in Saudi Arabia as they deliver energy, infrastructure and other petrochemical and refining projects. The firm is in the middle of a bid to build a sulphuric acid plant for Saudi Arabia.
SNC Lavalin also recently won a contract to build an offshore facility suite for Adco, the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company. This is a new direction for the company, which traditionally has only been involved in downstream oil and gas. SNC Lavalin has the capabilities, Bruce says, and is increasing the number of engineers in upstream and offshore.
Internally, Bruce says the projects that tend to get the most attention are those that go deeper and operate in the harshest conditions, and that both mining and oil and gas projects are pushing the boundaries in this way. He says: “The challenge is to come up with something that from a process engineering perspective works efficiently, but can also efficiently take on the market. In that mining is the same as oil and gas.”
First and foremost, it is Bruce’s appreciation for the constant onwards march of technology that attracts him to the oil and gas sector, as well as the international nature of the work. Highlights include working in the South China Sea 20 years ago in areas which were cordoned on from native Chinese, “a very odd situation”, he says. He describes visiting Sakhalin Island, Russia, in vivid terms - being struck by the under-developed “1960s James Bond-style airport” and the “communist grey stone buildings”. But, he says, “the people are completely different. They’ve moved on, even though the buildings haven’t”.
However, he gets animated when talking about the engineering project he was involved with at Sakhalin - the offshore Piltun-Astokhskoye platform built for Shell. The structural design for mating the topside and jacket facilities were particularly innovative. It required the design and casting of huge ball bearings for two of the four connections, so the topside could move slightly. “Ultimately you’ve got in excess of -30°C and its in an earthquake zone. So you don’t want a topside rigidly fixed to the jacket, otherwise you are going to increase lots of stress. So the design was fixed at one side, but gives enough flexibility to cope with the ground movement,” he says.
International projects and the globe-trotting roles of some roles in large engineering firms should be used more often to advertise the merits of the engineering profession, says Bruce, who believes that the UK has an “awful lot of work to do” before the standing of engineers in the UK is equal to the standing they receive in Germany, France or the US. With ambitions to quadruple the number of engineers working in the UK Resources Group from 1000 to 4000, he has a lot of advertising to do if he wants to attract the talent to support SNC Lavalin’s expansion. “If you are standing there and want a global, diversified career it’s the sector to be in. You can come into a company like ours, and if you are really interested in travelling in the world – there are plenty of opportunities.”