Host Intro (Gene Kim)

Up next is Suncor, Canada's largest energy company, with over $40 billion in revenue. It has operations in retailing but specializes in production of synthetic crude from oil sands, which it pioneered.

There are many interesting things about Suncor, including its focus on sustainability and its investment in clean, renewable energy. But for me, one of the most interesting parts about Suncor is its absolute focus on safety, which is so important because of the enormous danger involved in so many aspects of its daily operations.

Earlier this year, I asked Joey Roa, Director in Delivery Services Center of Excellence, if he could teach us about the safety culture at Suncor and how it sometimes helps and sometimes hinders getting important work done. I'm so delighted that not only did he say yes, but he'll be presenting an experience report of their journey, along with John Hill, Senior Vice President of Digital and Information Technology, and one of their key business partners, Lindsey Deluca, Director of Maintenance and Reliability from their mobile mining assets. Here's John, Lindsey, and Joey.

John A. Hill

Thank you, Gene. First of all, I'd like to thank you and the organizing committee of this summit for a great opportunity for us to share our story on transformation and for all of you to learn a bit about Suncor.

Our journey is not by any means complete and will continue to evolve for a number of years to come. But the real story we want to share with you today is how quickly the organization has adopted our new way of working to support what we call our Suncor 4.0 Digital Transformation.

First, let's learn a bit more about Suncor. We are Canada's largest and premier energy company. Our operations include oil sands development and upgrading. Alberta's oil sands are the third largest oil reserve globally after Venezuela and Saudi Arabia. We essentially follow the energy molecule from production to retail, whether it is oil and gas or electricity.

Our oil and gas production is a combination of technically savvy mining and offshore production. We refine our petroleum products and take them to market with a large national brand known as Petro-Canada and various partners for wholesale opportunities in the United States and abroad.

We operate in Canada and the U.S., with offshore assets in Eastern Canada, Scotland, and Norway, and with reserve assets on the continent of Africa. Our major refineries are in Colorado and three major locations across Canada. We have oil sands reserves of 29 years and over 50 million barrels of oil storage capacity currently in play. We take this to market through 1,875 retail locations across Canada and a vast majority of wholesale customers into the United States and across other parts of our region.

We are all about safety culture, and so here is Lindsey to start us off with the safety culture moment.

Lindsey Deluca

Thanks, John. As per Suncor tradition, we always start a meeting with a safety share or a safety reflection. I want to talk a little bit about the environment that we work in at Suncor.

We work in a risky, perilous environment. There have been multiple fatalities in the last 10 years across multiple different companies in the Wood Buffalo and Fort McMurray region. Our journey to zero has taken equally as long. There was a big transition period where we went from a culture of production over safety, to production being in line with safety, to finally prioritizing safety over production. It really was a combination at the various levels of management and the frontline workforce that got us here.

As we transition through this digital transformation effort, sometimes it's hard to reflect that the areas where we're impacting transformation are not in the downtown Calgary office and are not sitting working in your basement. It's out at the mine site.

The design and implementation of hardware and software has serious considerations of where and how we're completing these installs. We want our people to feel safe. We also have tremendous pressure to evolve and perform, and a key consideration of how we work needs to include safety at all different levels, whether it's the person turning the wrench on the floor, the person doing the coding, or the decision of hardware selection in the office in Calgary.

I'm going to pass it over to Joey, and he's going to take us through one of his experiences up at a site in Fort McMurray.

Joey Roa

Thanks, Lindsey. For those who don't know me, my name is Joey Roa. I'm the Director for Delivery Services Center of Excellence for Suncor. I operate in Calgary, and I want to share an experience that we recently had where I got enlightened about some of the safety culture that goes on in the Fort McMurray region.

Not too long ago, we had a project underway where we needed extensive Wi-Fi connectivity for some of the operations we were doing. To accelerate the delivery, we wanted to deploy what we call a COW, a cellular on wheels. For those not familiar with that, you can think of it like a giant cell tower on a platform that you can move around.

We arranged with some of our vendor partners to have this COW delivered to our Fort McMurray site. Unbeknownst to me, or as a newcomer to this whole safety culture, I was very aggressive in trying to push forward with this cell on wheels, this COW, to be delivered to a spot in the mine. It's technology. I'm not dealing with hydrocarbons. It's technology. I'm not dealing with some of the big machinery or heavy equipment that goes on.

What I had to become very acquainted with, though, is that in this big facility that is the Fort Hills mine, there's a lot of open space. What became very clear is that the technologists up at the site and the mining partners there started to come back to me saying: Are you prepared now to take responsibility all the way from Calgary for these vendor partners who might be operating in a very remote part of the mine, out of sight, in cold weather conditions? How will they get transport back to washrooms? How will they get transported back to find lunch or snacks? What will be the break periods? When it's minus 30 or minus 40, are they going to come in? Where are they going to go?

This whole part of the experience was a great grounding to me to now say: am I actually doing right by these individuals who are working on our behalf in what is a very perilous environment?

I really appreciated both the business partners and the technology partners on site grounding us to say: we appreciate the urgency of trying to drive value quickly, but we have to do so in a safety culture. We have to do so without putting our vendor partners or our staff at risk. That was a great grounding and a great lesson learned about how we can do stuff in collaboration, but also in a very safe fashion.

Gene also asked me: what's the most challenging part in dealing with our culture that's so driven by safety? One of the things I find is that when you bring new people in, especially people from a different industry where they're not as safety conscious or safety aware, the challenge is how you ground into them the urgency of safety. How do you ground into them the importance and, in some cases, the unfortunate repercussions if we don't do safety very effectively? Bringing those newcomers on board and helping them understand why safety is important can be a challenge unto itself.

Then it's also to balance the pressures. Sometimes there's a desire to go fast, but you have to consciously step back and ask: I'm going fast, but am I going safely? It's the ability to pull yourself out of the situation and say: I need to stop, or I am able to proceed and go forward in a safe fashion. How about yourself, Lindsey?

Lindsey Deluca

Similar to what you said in the latter half of your answer, I think sometimes the message that gets communicated when you're in the heat of the moment, or you've got to get that last ton to the extractor, is that the workforce hears that we are prioritizing production over safety, versus what we want them to hear, which is that we are prioritizing safety over production.

I think the most challenging part, and the biggest opportunity, to be honest, is how we show up as leaders to the frontline workforce and show them that absolutely we're prioritizing safety over production.

Joey Roa

Great call. And of course, Gene also flipped the question: what's the purpose here? What's the thing that we're most appreciative for? Lindsey, I'll start with you on that, and then I'll wrap up.

Lindsey Deluca

One of my favorite parts of working in a really safety-aware culture within a mining environment is that it's everybody's responsibility to show up and not only look out for yourself, but look out for the person next to you, knowing that every single person there has somebody they want to go home to in the same way that they came to work. That's really what drives me to push safety culture: it's everybody's responsibility.

Joey Roa

I love that, and I'll try to build on that. The thing I came to really appreciate is that it builds such a bond across the entire organization. Regardless of what discipline you are, whether it's finance, IT, the business, mining, or maintenance, you have a common element in saying safety is our first piece, and that brings commonality right away, right out of the gate.

The other element is knowing that we're a big organization, that we're treating our most important asset of people, and we're putting them first. We're saying we recognize the importance and priority of our staff, and we'll put that ahead of profitability, ahead of other items, to make sure people can go home at night. I'm very proud of being in a company that does that.

I want to hand this now back to John Hill, where he'll continue the journey about what our strategic priorities are for Suncor and the enterprise.

John A. Hill

Thank you, Lindsey and Joey. It's been a great opportunity to continue to talk about our industry changes. We're under tremendous change in the industry, as most of you know. New ways of working and energy expansion are key to our future and to the world.

We've defined six key priorities I quickly want to share with you. First, we want to continue to grow our long-term returns on invested capital. We want to be a net zero greenhouse gas emissions company by 2050 and substantially contribute to society's net zero goals. We want to sustain and optimize our base business while improving cost and carbon competitiveness. We want to continue to grow low greenhouse gas emissions businesses associated to those that materially contribute to earnings and cash flow. We want to continue to grow our customer connections through low-carbon products and services. And we want to achieve world-class, and this is extremely important, world-class ESG performance and disclosure while we're being recognized as a leader in sustainability in the energy transition.

Every one of these pillars has an element of digital transformation, and I'm proud to lead our team on this journey where DevOps is at the core of our success.

Let's talk about this DevOps journey. You can see some of the big rocks on this slide, but let me cover a few highlights. You have to understand our culture and history. We have a longstanding engineering culture where many of our assets and operations are planned and designed, rightfully so, with the utmost level of safety and reliability in mind for decades of operations.

But optimizing these assets, harvesting the wealth of data we have, and simplifying our processes fundamentally needed a more adaptable and agile approach. Along comes Agile and DevOps and a culture focused around that. Technology is key, but it's far more than taking advantage of enabling technologies. We need to focus on innovation, making a step change in our user experience, disrupting old ways of thinking, and reorganizing our delivery teams.

We took a grassroots approach on standing up Agile product teams on several strategically selected high-value projects and business opportunities. Let me keep this story very simple so we can hear from our stars in a moment. Bottom line, we quickly formed product teams, removed traditional project and governance overhead, focused on incremental value, and most importantly embedded a level of trust with our business and development teams, knowing we had their back to experiment and take different approaches.

The teams were hungry for this change, and we are seeing an amazing groundswell of support across the board. Let's hear from one of our business stars, Lindsey, on making this journey real.

Lindsey Deluca

Thanks, John. Before we get into the opportunity and the method of solution delivery, I'd like to provide some context as to the maintenance environment in the mine at Suncor.

We maintain a wide range of assets that move waste and ore and allow for bitumen production at our facilities. Currently, we own, operate, and maintain about 200 ultra-class truck fleets, up to 400-ton rock trucks. They range from 320 to 400 tons, with primarily a 400-ton fleet. These trucks are big. The payload capacity of each truck is approximately 180 F-150 pickup trucks, to put it into perspective. They work in some of the most severe mining operating conditions and run 24 hours a day and 365 days a year.

Every time one of these assets is out of service, for either planned maintenance or unexpected failures, it costs money because we are not moving material. Maximizing uptime is therefore critical for value generation.

Before we move on to our next slide, take notice of the pictures below. The picture on the left is a sample of what our shops look like with the ultra-class truck in the background, and the two slides on the right show how the sites currently look and feel and would be very similar to other sites around the globe that have not gone through a digital transformation. Currently, whiteboards are used to allow for visibility as to what is in the shop, and all the notes are recorded on pieces of paper that are then transcribed manually.

Our customer, the mobile maintenance team, came to us asking for a solution that can transition the current binders with paper-printed work orders to a digital platform. Other challenges we learned we needed to overcome are the differences between union and non-union sites and historical challenges that were faced when attempts were made at implementing similar ideas.

There is an opportunity to allow the maintainers to flag the supervisor or other maintenance staff when there is an issue with the job. Ultimately, these issues cause work to stop and efficiency to be lost. These shops are also very big. Some of them are up to a kilometer long. It is a lot of ground to cover to go bay to bay looking for these issues.

After evaluating what different off-the-shelf market solutions could be implemented, we decided to pursue a custom DevOps software solution. What we found when we were looking at market solutions is the highest-value-driven features may not have been included, or they were diluted with features that our customers truly did not need.

We set up a construction team using our Suncor Agile norm standards and DevOps standard tools, and we developed a technology strategy that would allow us to focus on the highest-value features first and was scalable to other facilities and integrated with other enterprise platforms.

A large consideration when selecting our technology stack was that we were in control of system performance. This is a monumental leap for our maintenance shops, as you can imagine. We really cannot afford to have any downtime, or little downtime, on the system. Once we move away from paper, if the system goes down, work will stop, and as I've iterated above, that is lost value to our business.

Our solution, which we are currently transitioning from POC to MVP, includes a monitor, a worker kiosk, and a supervisor dashboard. The supervisor or other maintenance staff can be flagged and called to a bay as soon as an issue arises for quick resolution. No one needs to leave the bay looking for a supervisor, and no one needs to be waiting for a supervisor to come and address the problem. This ultimately increases wrench time and gets the asset out the door quicker.

We also have prescriptive delivery of tasks and control over work. The maintainers no longer have the ability to select what work they feel like doing, but instead are required to follow the well-laid-out and sequential task list for optimizing the work. The supervisors are also able to see if the work is ahead or behind schedule.

This whole process looks and feels extremely different from how I would have done projects similar to this in the past. Our process has involved the customer from the first day, and we've included subject matter experts along the way. The product we envisioned in February is not what we will be seeing when we roll this out this fall, and this is a very good thing. We were able to drive the most valuable features first, and we've really got a good understanding of what would and would not provide value.

The build team is well integrated and a satisfied working team, and I'm really looking forward to seeing how quickly we can push and test value-driven features in the future through our CI/CD pipeline. This is not only valuable for the build team, but it's invaluable for the customer. They can quickly bring a feature to us, and we can assess the value and turn it into action, and they can get a good, reliable product at the end.

Once the customer sees our ability to turn an idea into action quickly, I've got full confidence that the pipeline will start filling, and it is incredibly important for us to have a process for new features as well as maintaining our current software.

I'm now going to pass it over to Joey, who will be walking us through the challenges we've encountered in this journey and how we are managing through them.

Joey Roa

Thanks, Lindsey. Our journey's been really exciting. The fruits ahead are amazing, but it doesn't mean that we haven't had some challenges that we've had to overcome. This is but a sample of some of the challenges that we have when we bring in new ways of working, Agile delivery, and DevOps concepts into a large enterprise.

First, there's a lot of handoffs that we have to deal with. We have a lot of departments that we have to navigate just to get the basic work started. We have a buy mentality, and that's a good thing, but in some circumstances, the ability to actually purchase a solution for us doesn't exist. So how do we now introduce a build concept into a culture that is traditionally buy-oriented?

That brings us to the next challenge: development is a new muscle for us. In many cases, we haven't done development for years. So how do we now support a business partner such as Lindsey and bring forth value in small increments to help them out?

The next piece is that, from a CI/CD pipeline, the continuous integration and continuous deployment pipeline is new technology that we're introducing into Suncor. So how do we simultaneously bring a culture as well as a technology stack into an organization?

Finally, the whole traditional mindset is one where we do the requirements, do the designs, do the build, do the testing, and then give it to the customer. Moving into more of a DevOps mindset and an Agile-based delivery, we're trying to break everything down into small chunks. These challenges were paramount in the Digital Bay project.

How do we solve that? First, as John and Lindsey both alluded to, we had tremendous leadership support from above. They were going to encourage us and continue to encourage us to take experimental approaches to bring value back to the customers, to the business, as early as we can. We had the air support from them to try something different.

We were able to take a small cross-functional team. Instead of having a team of specialists that we had to hand off from step to step to step, we brought forward a small team. That small team was charged with doing a little bit of a market scan, and talking to partners to see if there was a product that we could purchase. Once we satisfied ourselves that there wasn't anything in the marketplace that we could actually buy and install, we went forward and commissioned a development project.

With that development project, we had the ability to actually start to introduce CI/CD concepts and technologies right out of the gate. Concepts such as test-driven development, orchestration, and proper test automation were brought in right from the word go. This allowed us to bring new technologies in that didn't upset the enterprise architecture standards that we have.

We were able to bring forward these concepts to the business upfront and early and explain to them the quality improvements that we can get and allay their concerns about what happens if this goes down. We want to provide assurances that escaped defects would be minimized as much as possible, and that if an escaped defect did get into production, our ability to restore operations quickly was paramount.

With all these line items, we're still early in the journey, but the journey is looking so promising. This is only one project that is in front of us. I'm going to hand this back now to John Hill, Senior Vice President, and he'll tell us more about where Suncor is going on the DevOps journey as a whole.

John A. Hill

Thanks, Joey and Lindsey. So where to from here for us? First, we're going to continue to mature our DevOps capabilities and take advantage of our ability to promote these results. Most importantly, we're going to nurture the business pull that we are seeing as they are hearing about more engaged employees and faster benefits realization, both absolutely fantastic to overall strategy.

I have to be honest, we're seeing requests for these new ways of working from areas none of us really expected, and not just on technology projects, but a raft of other opportunities within the business.

To put this goodness in perspective, we have empowered business product owners to drive aggressive change with a more engaged and nimble delivery team at an overall lower cost to run the business. Our results speak volumes, and with increasing demands on our team to help change the company, we are in a good place.

To our friend G, Flatland continues. Thank you.