Hudbay Minerals' Canadian operations in Flin Flon and Snow Lake Manitoba include mines, mills, processing plants and maintenance shops with new mine and mill projects well underway, employ almost a 1,000 employees and contractors. In 2011 and 2012 they had record years in Safety and now have achieved a 73% improvement in their LTA frequency over the last four years.

In 2009, we began implementing the PASS process in the Hudbay organization and across all their operations in Northern Manitoba. Assisting the consultants' work onsite were an increasing number of PASS Masters from Hudbay and the project was supported by Ian Cooper, Safety Manager at Hudbay. Key personnel were chosen to attend the Masters course in Kelowna and upon their return, drive the system forward in their departments/organizations as internal experts. A true partnership; between the PASS Consultants and their PASS Masters. Over the next several years, Hudbay as an organization went through a number of changes, not just in organizational structure, but also in culture. In 2010 their smelter in Flin Flon was decommissioned, then in 2012 both Trout Lake and Chisel North mines reached their end of mine life. As you can imagine, this displaced a number of personnel across the organization and many were assigned new roles and responsibilities and simultaneously, projects began on the construction of new mines in the area.

Near the site of the old Chisel North mine work began building the new Lalor project and a brand new copper circuit was added to the Snow Lake Mill. Also, a new venture in between Flin Flon and Snow Lake broke ground, known as the Reed copper project. Expertise from surrounding operations were sent to these new projects and they worked along side contractors from organizations such as Redpath and Dumas mining, who were sinking new main and vent shafts for Lalor. Wanting to integrate not only their systems but their culture with the new contractors onsite, we were invited to expand our implementation to included the shaft sinking crews of Redpath and Dumas. Both contractors have fully commited to the PASS process and we are very impressed with their ownership in the system.

Hudbay has certainly transformed as an company in recent years and to achieve such a significant improvement in Safety during a period of rapid change and growth is quite an accomplishment for everyone onsite. As a testament to their commitment to establishment their Safety Culture forward across all Hudbay operations and to compliment other systems and process' internally, we've recently begun implementing PASS at their project in Peru as well.

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