Vanessa Visman to lead new Aurecon team

Aurecon has appointed Vanessa Visman as Principal – Asset Management and Performance. In the role she will establish and lead an Operations Performance and Assurance team designed to help organisations operate new and existing assets at peak performance. 

Aurecon says Visman, who joins from Hatch, is a globally recognised operational readiness specialist with a proven track record in building world-class teams and achieving sustainably measurable outcomes and value to clients across multiple industries. 

Aurecon Managing Principal – Asset Management and Performance John Searls says Visman and her new team were hired to optimise operational and business readiness for new assets or existing assets prioritised for sustaining capital investment or transformation.

“Vanessa’s decades of strategic and hands-on leadership with asset-intensive organisations helps businesses improve ramp-up time of assets and achieve stable operations more quickly,” says Searls. “Her team will work across markets with a focus on resources, water and transport.

“Assets that are slow to reach peak performance at start-up can cause significant safety and operational risks, not to mention substantial impacts to an organisation’s bottom line. Effective operational readiness can save months of ramp-up time and increase operational performance.

“The problem extends to brownfield sites as well, given that reinvestment to uplift productivity still requires preparation so that operations and the business can deliver expected performance levels,” says Searls.

“As our clients look to decarbonise, the complexity of linking operations to existing business is often underestimated. For example, changing the fundamental energy source for an industrial plant is not as simple as switching off one power supply and turning on another. Issues around maintaining reliability of supply and strategies used to deploy operations have to be worked through carefully. 

“Vanessa is a hugely valuable addition to our Aurecon team and will really transform how we advise our clients on harnessing asset value.”

Visman says she is looking forward to achieving results across a diverse client base at Aurecon.

“My team’s success in the past for clients has come from pairing our operations expertise with our commodity experience,” she says. “Aurecon’s vast experience across markets including defence, water and transport really opens up the opportunities that we can advise in to maximise our clients’ results.

“There are already fantastic foundations across Aurecon’s engineering and advisory business, such as asset management, environmental and digital systems, that we’ll be connecting into for maximum benefit. We will take my existing knowledge base, built of nearly 30 years’ operations and project experiences in the mining and metals, infrastructure and manufacturing industries, to the next level by adding in framework elements for additional markets such as water, transport, defence and energy. 

“Operational readiness has only existed as a concept in business for 15 years, but the opportunities are tremendous as we help companies optimise their assets with a future operations lens.”