How to Improve Your Productivity Through Mine Operations Management
Introduction: The Need for Resilience
Resilience is often defined as the ability to recover quickly from difficulty or setback, but it can also mean the ability to absorb or avoid that difficulty or setback before it happens.
The mining industry today is facing pressure from a number of sources, all with the ability to cause significant damage. These include a decline in resource quality, greater market volatility, rising input costs (energy, utilities, labour), and a greater expectation from the public that the mining industry will improve mining process ESG and sustainability KPIs.
But these pressures are not insurmountable.
This article describes what advanced Mine Operations Management is and how mining companies can use it to become resilient enough to recover quickly from – or even avoid – the setbacks today’s pressures can cause.
The four articles that follow in this series describe how advanced mine operations management can improve the way mining companies currently:
- measure equipment performance
- record and reconcile mine production
- grade control (particularly important in lower-grade deposits), and
- report mine production.
Traditional mine operations management
Traditionally, mining companies have captured operations data manually, often writing information down on paper before transferring it to an Excel spreadsheet that they then send out by email. This works, but it’s both prone to error and slow: vital data may take 24 or 48 hours before it reaches a mine manager, for example – too late for that manager to make a change that could improve production, reduce a cost or increase sustainability.
It also builds organizational and technological silos, where important information may be held in one area of the company when it could be of great use to someone in another department, but they don’t even know it exists. These silos also hamper the ability for mine managers to see all stages of the mining process and to identify essentials such as:
- the causes of production delays or equipment downtime
- actual production compared to target production
- how well grade control is performing, and
- where the latest data required for production reporting is located.
Advanced Mine Operations Management
Advanced mine operations management fuses together software – including operational control, material reconciliation and asset performance programs – to eliminate the manual handling of information and reliably link all sources of data, from fleet management to weighbridge, laboratory to stockpiles and everything in-between, into one single source of truth.
The result is greater control over mine operations and a better understanding of how today’s production will affect revenue, cash flow, costs and forecasts – leading to better decisions and improved resilience to industry pressures.
In Article 2 of this series, we discuss how to use advanced Mine Operations Management to collect and visually present equipment performance information and interact with equipment performance data to understand what worked and what didn’t.
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