Profile ENGINEERING A TRADITION

He is an affable, part-time hobby farmer from southern Ontario, a tall, trim man with a greying pate and an avuncular air. In appearance and manner he seems just too nice and easygoing to be running one of the nation’s hottest engineering companies. But John Thomas Dew does, and he’s doing it well. Kilborn Ltd., of which Dew is chairman, employs 800 people. Most of them have at least 10 years’ experience in mine engineering, although 30 of them actually have more than 25 years’ experience. From seven offices in Canada and two in the U.S., they have designed so many mills for the mining industry that they pretty well know where every available piece of equipment is stashed. In some cases, Kilborn engineers have recycled the same piece of milling equipment on at least three different projects, to the immense satisfaction of cost-conscious customers.

“Our reputation is mainly based on the fact that we have very strong process people with lots of practical experience,” Dew says. “In this, we take the back seat to nobody. Anyone can do `brick-and-mortar’ engineering, so you have to have a special niche.”

Back in 1947 when Kenneth Kilborn founded the company, there was nobody to take a back seat to. Mr Kilborn set up shop with just four employees in the basement of a foundry in Mimico, Ont., on the western outskirts of Toronto. At the time, Dew was a young mechanical engineer fresh out of the University of Toronto. He worked his first year after graduation as a draftsman for Massey Ferguson. On Sundays, at his minister-father’s Anglican church, Dew became acquainted with the Kilborn family. Then in 1950, as the mining industry was flattening out after the post-war boom, Mr Kilborn offered him a job as draftsman at his young, growing company.

“He was a down-to-earth guy whose main ambition was to see the company grow,” Dew recalls of Mr Kilborn, who died in 1959. “Seeking recognition was not in his nature.” As a junior engineer, Dew, with pencil in hand, was put on the drawing board from day one. “Ken, who was noted for his short temper, would look over our shoulders early in the morning, chew us out over something, then be as nice as could be a few hours later,” Dew says of his former boss (not to mention father-in-law).

Dew got his first real taste of mining working on a survey party at a 500-ton-per-day gold mill in Noranda, Que., owned by Donalda Mines. That was in 1950. Today, after 37 years and 1,500 projects with the company, he is chairman of a major international, diversified engineering company involved in a plethora of new mining projects.

The number of new mine developments in Canada has picked up in recent years. For the past two or three years, exploration companies have been finding droves of orebodies — mostly gold-bearing. This year, 17 new mines opened in Canada and next year there will be at least 16 more. With all these mines coming on stream, consulting engineering companies like Acres Davy McKee Engineering, Bechtel Canada, Fluor Canada, Wright Engineers and Kilborn Ltd. can bid on lots of new mill design and construction projects. And, according to Dew, Kilborn is winning a good share of them.

Dew admits he can’t give the personal touch to each project that Ken Kilborn once could. In fact, the company is so busy that he has a tough time listing all the Kilborn projects. The company is working on six gold mills in the state of Nevada alone. About 60% of Kilborn’s business is mining-related.

But it wasn’t gold that put the company into the big leagues of engineering. Developing Saskatchewan’s huge potash reserves in the late ’60s did that. The design of two potash processing plants — the K2 plant of International Minerals and Chemical Corp. (Canada) in Esterhazy and Cominco’s potash plant in Vanscoy — won Kilborn awards of merit from the Association of Consulting Engineers in 1968 and 1969.

Now, in its 40th year, Kilborn is not quite as conservative as it once was, Dew says. The slogan chosen for the company’s commemorative letterhead reads: “A Tradition of Quality with Integrity.” To Dew, this means honesty, pure and simple.

“We tell it like it is,” he explains. “We have walked away from projects and people have walked away from us, based on our feasibility studies.” Many of those studies remain confidential, locked up in a company vault waiting for the day when the properties on which they are based become mineable.

Today, John Dew is more involved with business development — a part of engineering that has become more expensive in the past decade. “It’s not difficult work, but it takes a lot of time and effort to get in to see people. And they have to get to know you before you get on their bid list. In some cases you have to pre-qualify, especially for the big jobs. In general, it reflects the litigious nature of society,” Dew says. “We saw things starting to change in the ’50s when we started getting exposure to the bigger and more sophisticated American clients. Before that, your word and a handshake was good enough to close a deal. Basically, it’s engineering man-hours that people are buying today. The engineering content has been reduced to a minimum. And today’s marketplace is so competitive, there is no room for error. Returns are much lower now in engineering, so you have to be right the first time.”

But Dew is just as keen to see Kilborn Ltd. grow as were his predecessors in the chairman’s chair — Kenneth Dewar (1970-76), Mervin Upham (1979-83) and Richard Roach (1983-85). But Dew has not achieved growth for the company by taking over existing engineering companies. That strategy was tried once in Denver, and it didn’t work. “We have been good at playing the provincial game instead,” Dew says of the policy of setting up offices, each with its own charter, in six provinces and letting them go ahead and do their own thing.

Dew was responsible for the Montreal, Que., office between 1952 and 1953. During those years, the company did a lot of work for the asbestos mines in the Eastern Twps. That stint exposed Dew to just about every piece of mineral-dressing equipment around.

In another case, when the company set up shop in Saskatoon, Sask., the man put in charge of the office, John Summers, was given plenty of freedom right from day one. Immediately after being hired in 1975, Dew, as president, flew out to meet Summers. Sitting on the floor of an empty office, their voices echoing off the walls, they made their plans. Dew assured him he would have Kilborn’s full support from Toronto, then he left to go back to the big city. “He was so shocked by the company’s apparent lack of structure,” Dew recalls, “but we knew he was a good guy and we were willing to back him up. In those days, growth came through developing people.” That confidence has paid off, too. Kilborn, as the largest engineering firm in Saskatchewan, is now involved in the biggest industrial project in the history of that province — a $600-million heavy-oil-upgrader project in Regina.

Besides opening offices in the provinces over the years, Kilborn has associated itself with some major international engineering concerns. John Brown Engineers & Constructors of the U.K., an offshore oil and gas development firm, is an example. Dew says engineering is now more capital- intensive. “We have a lot of money invested in computers and things, so management has become more of a money thing than a people thing.” Kilborn is developing a new generation of computer-aided design (cad) systems for use on micro-computers. The project is being managed under Kilborn’s integrated computer system of planning, capital-cost-estimating, engineering and construction control, procurement control, and cost control.

Along with computerization has come a change within the company itself. Today most of the engineers are computer “hackers” and the electrical engineering department is now the biggest in the company.

A key component of Mr Kilborn’s philosophy that has been carried on by Dew is the idea that all employees should have an opportunity to hold shares in the company. Today about 38% of all employees have a personal stake in the company’s profits. The company is 100% Canadian-owned.

“That policy has resulted in a good feeling of togetherness within the company,” Dew says. “When mining goes through its cycles, we move our people back and forth across the country to minimize the ups and downs.”

But that is not to say the number of employees at Kilborn has not fluctuated with those cycles. Kilborn employed a total of 1,100 people at the peak of the mining boom that occurred before the 1982 recession — and as few as 600 in those recessionary years. Today the company occupies four of the seven floors of a glass office building on the shores of Lake Ontario, just west of downtown Toronto. When the building was constructed in 1979, it marked a milestone in Dew’s career. A farmer by avocation, he takes pride in providing employees with a workplace that has all the conveniences, sans the pressures, of downtown office life — the type of environment that encourages growth. That principle of growth is what Dew means to see carried on as a company tradition.