Petra Events Management holds 6th International Operations and Maintenance in Arab Countries conference

Opened under the auspices of the Prime Minister of Jordan Nader Al Dahabi, and under the theme of "cost effective maintenance" expertise and engineers from the private and public sectors in the region and abroad are discussing across-the-board topics related to the importance of operations and maintenance in creating and shaping the future.

Organizers of the conference and exhibition are ExiCon Exhibitions and Conferences of Beirut, the Specialist Group of Riyadh and Petra Events Management, a division of the Petra Travel and Tourism Co in Amman.

Petra Events Management have become of the organizing partners and execution agent after the venue changed places from being held in Beirut which should have been last summer to its present location in Amman.

The topics going to the heart of Arab development, include cost effective management, standards for asset management strategies, waste water collection systems, planned maintenance, electrical production stations and the issue of building concrete structures to withstand earthquakes, bridges, value engineering and risk assessments.

These are being delivered by experts from Switzerland, Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, United Kingdom, Denmark, Libya, the United Arab Emirates, Lebanon and Syria in the conference with speakers stressing the issue of good operations and maintenance for growing economies in the Arab world that have rapid rates of economic growth in at least the last five years.

The Arab Institute for Operations and Maintenance is the driving force behind the conference whose officials put a premium on the event saying it helps in standardizing the quality and measurement for operations and maintenance and leads to Arab development through public-private sectors cooperation and stressing at the same time that "engineering is the science of life" concept.

Guido Walt of the European Federation of the National Maintenance Societies who gave a paper and chaired one of the sessions stressed "we have to talk about the 'spirit of maintenance' as shaping our future" and that what must be done is to create a "culture of maintenance" in our economies to upgrade quality and solidify our heritage, leadership, environment, integrity and conservation of resources.

One discussion session on the first day was devoted to what organizers say the Malaysian Experience which was important to introduce a comparative approach to operations and maintenance. Expert speakers from Malaysia came especially and discussed innovative approaches to optimizations of water treatment plant operation, military transport planes and structural integrity monitoring, workforce management distribution and capital intensive and strategic assets between OECD countries and Malaysia.

Officials say the Malaysian experience is being stressed because there could be similarities in approaches with different Arab countries who maybe following similar paths in their economic sectors.

Working papers from Saudi Arabia has been plenty on such issues as power generation, efficiency and optimization, performance-based assessment related to airfield development and methods of management as well as quality maintenance, development niches which the Kingdom is going through.

Mazen Kawar, Managing Partner of Petra Tours and runs Petra Events Management says such a conference is global setting a very important development agenda for the Arab world, and as three executing partners with ExiCon and the Specialist Group, we serve that goal of progress in bringing different countries, partners and delegates together under one roof.