WANO hosts a successful online Site Vice Presidents’ and Plant Managers’ conference
Features
Vol 30 No 2 2020
16 November 2020
The 2020 WANO Site Vice Presidents' & Plant Managers' Conference was due to take place in Kyoto, Japan. However, due to the global COVID-19 pandemic, WANO made the decision to cancel the face-to-face meeting.
Instead, the conference was held online using a secure virtual event portal. Held on two different days, the content was duplicated and streamed live at different times to accommodate all global time zones for WANO members.
Tom Mitchell, WANO Chairman, opened the conference with an overview of the industry’s Action for Excellence initiative and then introduced the conference theme: Leadership: Setting Direction during Challenging Times – and emphasised that leadership is the key factor that delivers excellent plant performance. He asked members to use the conference case studies to inspire them to develop strong leaders and to deliver improvements in performance.
Carlo Wolters, Chief Executive Officer at N.V. EPZ (Power Production) delivered an inspiring keynote address to delegates on how does leadership contribute to strong performance?
This was followed by a CNO panel session that featured Chien Fu-Tien Vice President & Chief Executive Officer, Nuclear Division at the Taiwan Power Company, Dr Igor Zonov General Inspector at JSC Rosenergoatom, Eduardo Lasso de la Vega General Manager at CNAT and Christopher Costanzo Senior Vice President of Nuclear Operation at Entergy. Each panellist discussed how setting direction and modelling behaviours has helped them achieve their outcomes.
Following this, the plant manager panel session featured Wu Yuanming, Plant General Manager, Sanmen Nuclear Power Company, Lisa Hilbert, Plant Manager, North Anna Power Station, Satu Katajala, Plant Manager, Loviisa Nuclear Power Plant and Jan Karjalainen, Acting Managing Director, OKG AB. Each representative talked about their own inspiring stories of how leadership has improved performance at their plants. Both panel sessions were followed by a live Q&A session with the panellists.
Ingemar Engkvist, WANO Chief Executive Officer closed the conference by thanking all those who shared valuable experience and participated, and provided more details of the industry’s Action for Excellence initiative.
The conference was a great success with over 250 representatives attending from WANO’s global membership. A full recording of the conference is available to members on the WANO member website.