Hard times demand optimised mining operations

Over the past few years mining companies have shown a sharp U-turn from capital investment to cost cutting and in many cases, sell offs, to compensate for losses and to avoid complete closure of their businesses.

To survive the current volatility and remain operational until there is renewed demand, mines have to improve their resource utilisation and redefine their operational processes.

Optimising the mining value chain

The value chain of a mine has a domino effect. As one activity is completed, the next activity commences with each activity relying on the successful execution of the preceding activity.

This may work in a virtual world of planning, but given the challenges noted above, mining companies now have to identify and define value chains and activities that cater for the current state of the market. These value chains and activities should also enable the respective mining operations to achieve the required cost reductions and improved productivity output in the face of falling commodity prices and demand.

Typically mines have a value chain configured across a variety of independent resource and production information systems. Poor systems integration, working with isolated data views and a general lack of real-time data reporting has made it difficult for mining companies to effectively manage and improve operations.

For example, human resource systems are not aware of the status of assets in asset management systems, yet the status of one directly affects the other. Therefore the business silos remain unaware of the latest status, operating parameter and schedules being carried out across the value chain and decisions are often made based on assumption and experience. That may be enough to maintain productivity, but it won’t improve the use of resources and increase productivity.

Mines need to manage their operations using consolidated and coordinated real-time data obtained from all systems across its estate and provide for the improvement of systems to capture analytical data, which can be used for measuring historical performance and productivity gains.

Integrated planning and optimisation in the face of volatility

Having a unified status view of operations across the value chain means being able to track actual versus budgeted output and mitigate risk with real-time interventions, as variances occur is possible and can save mines time and money.

Say management is able to view processing and the quality of output as it occurs at the processing plant and has the means to halt processing and immediately implement the required changes, it would save the time and money compared to only addressing variances at the end of a shift.

This allows for dynamic planning, the optimising and scheduling of processes, logistics, maintenance and other mine activities in an optimised and co-ordinated manner. Using estate-wide data for reporting and analytics, a mining company can differentiate itself from other companies on the basis of enhanced operational awareness and cost effective output.

It is clear that mining companies need to adopt a more robust and sophisticated uptake of technology to improve their operations. Accurate, real-time monitoring of equipment with analytics to audit the drivers behind equipment breakdowns, stoppages, poor maintenance and errors during operations to ascertain, why, what and when and how to avert in the future will help mining companies to increase productivity and reduce costs.