Wayne Bould, Managing Director and CEO of Grange Resources, has been with the organisation since 2008. His first appointment to the company was as general manager, overseeing the Southdown project in Western Australia. The following year, Grange finalised its merger with ABM, which resulted in Wayne’s promotion to COO. He helped weather the storm of the GFC and took up his current position in June last year.
The promotion to managing director coincided with Grange relocating its head office from Perth to Burnie in north-west Tasmania. When we consummated the merger, it would be fair to say that the Tasmanian operations were subject to a close-down mentality for several years. The business was scheduled to close and just run down its stockpiles through until the end of 2008, early 2009. There was a mine-life extension plan put in place, which basically said that the mine could go longer, further, and deeper, but they really hadn’t done a lot about putting any of the necessities in place such that that could be enacted.
“The business was also heavily siloed; it was traditionally run by a management group of the old-fashioned ’bring me, tell me, I know everything’ management group. There was not a lot of participative management, and it was very difficult to see from one end of the business to the other. The first thing that we decided to do was bring in some total quality management principles based on Deming’s ‘plan-do-check-act cycle,’ short interval control, and start to break down the silos and open up the business so you could see from one end to the other and get the management teams involved.”