Article #4: Prepare Your Financial Model and Share Your Plan
My last article talked about the importance of using 4D simulations to thoroughly test a tactical mine plan — the plan that turns the decisions outlined in your strategic mine plan into a schedule that will govern your mine’s day-to-day operations — long before you commit to it.
These automated, multi-dimensional simulations are vital because they allow you to vary your inputs and monitor your outputs a virtually limitless number of times until you arrive at a schedule that’s optimised not only for targets but also for external factors, such as cost or risk.
But you are not quite finished yet. You have two more steps to go.
Next step
Once you have determined your schedule and you know which blocks to mine and when, it’s time to prepare the financial model for your tactical mine plan.
This model is the tool your mine managers will use to forecast and plan for operating expenditures and revenues over the life of the mine, and may make the difference on your mine’s ability to borrow money or raise funds from investments.
Generally developed in spreadsheets with the help of a tool such as MineSched, your financial model will show the mining sequence you have selected in terms of its financial consequences, on a period-by-period basis, on both:
- monetary KPIs derived from the production sequence, such as tonnes and grades, and
- cost and revenue.
Final step
With your schedule settled and your financial model complete, you are ready for the final step: sharing your tactical mine plan with all stakeholders to make sure you have their buy in.
Remember, however, that not all stakeholders will require (or have permission to access) all information, and that different types of downstream stakeholders require different types of results. For example:
- mine managers and executives are most interested in anything related to costs and revenues
- operators require plots that describe actionable jobs in the field
- plant operators wants details about material arriving at the beneficiation plant, and
- mine engineers will look for graphs and charts showing the period-by-period volume, tonnes and grades for all material movements in the operation.
That means you need a way to publish your tactical mine plan in many formats — reports, graphs, spreadsheets, etc. — while making sure that each stakeholder has access only to the data they are permitted to view. Because mining is not a predictable process and results can change at any moment, you will also need to be able to quickly update the tactical mine plan you first published and share the new version with stakeholders easily.
The need for a central publishing platform
A central publishing platform, such as that available through Dassault Systèmes’ 3DEXPERIENCE, ensures that publishing your plan does not become a bottleneck in the planning process.
A central platform makes it easy to publish in multiple formats and to share customised information for each stakeholder: you can define what information can be viewed or edited by whom, and what level of detail each stakeholder needs to have. It also allows you to generate rapid updates whenever you need to, while ensuring that stakeholders only have access to the latest version of the tactical mine plan, thereby ensuring a single source of truth.
Contact me
I hope this series of articles on how to build a tactical mine plan has given you a few things to think about and perhaps even act upon. Please get in touch if you have any questions or would like to learn more. I am happy to help! Learn more about our Tactical Mine Planning industry process experience.
Read the full series
