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A Stitch in Time Saves a Tonne of Resource Wastage at a Mine

January 23, 2019

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Ever heard “a stitch in time saves nine”?

In the mining context, being able to respond quickly to exigencies by identifying critical issues involved would help a mine reduce losses due to downtime. More importantly, it may even save precious lives of miners if the incidents involve them.

A stitch in time, hence, could save several lives in a mine and a lot of costs due to downtime.

Unplanned Downtime

Many of the mines operate all hours of the day, and all days of the year. They never halt their operations. Mines, having invested millions of dollars in the establishment and operations can ill afford to pause, even for a movement. It, therefore, follows that when the mining activities are in full swing, unplanned downtime involving equipment and asset failures turn out to be very expensive.

Typically 60 hours of downtime per incident at up to $3000/hour in lost production per incident will result in a whopping $180,000 per each incident. It is also found that hydraulic power and belt drive failures cause up to 47% of downtime at mining operations.

Most of these incidents involving machinery occur because, the mining staff is unable to see the issues as they develop. There is no system to accurately measure the health of the machines. This right now means expensive repairs, loss in production, personnel safety concerns and reduced profitability.

It is estimated that the total cost of unscheduled downtime can be as much as 15 times that of a scheduled event.

Safety Concerns

In countries where mining contributes significantly to the economy, it also employs hundreds of thousands of people. It also has the dubious title of having the highest fatality rate of any industry.

Mines by their very nature involve risky working conditions. So it follows that the likelihood of an incident involving injury to the workers or even deaths is more imminent at a mine compared to any other profession. Hence, worker’s safety is of prime importance.

Governments across the world have devised stringent regulations about mine safety to enforce worker’s safety at mines. Fines for incidents could range from millions of dollars to closing down of the mine itself.

A solution in the horizon

The ability to monitor every resource; fleet, material, activities, people, etc. and track their location and performance in real time would enable quick decision-making.

Avoiding information silos and making relevant information readily available to all stakeholders is very important. This would improve all the processes involved in mining, including the processes of relating to exigencies. Mines have lots to lose in an unfortunate event at the mine.

Mining companies are realising the value they could unlock from their existing business through having access to relevant real-time information.

Real-time information fed into the appropriate management systems enables users to automate daily operational decision-making process. This could decrease the time to complete each task due to quicker and more accurate decisions based on reliable data, instead of decisions based on experience, intuition or biases.

Taking into account these unique issues faced by the mines and unavailability of a tailor-made affordable solution, we set about creating a comprehensive system designed exclusively for mines. We created Reactore®.

Developed from the scratch to be reactive (reactive to load, reactive to events, reactive to failure, and reactive to users), Reactore® is a dynamic enterprise solution capable of instantly reacting to events & user actions, it would broadcast actionable information to relevant parties in real-time, with zero latency.

The flexibility of Reactore® would help mines to collaborate effectively with existing systems to extend the real-time data flow between every department and every activity.

The streams of data from all assets and activities are analysed and transformed into meaningful KPIs on the dashboard. This dashboard would provide a pan-mine view (both location and performance status updates) of all operations.

Conclusion

With escalating operation costs, erratic market conditions, dwindling ore grades and crippling government regulations for mine incidents, embracing the status quo and not taking proactive action is not an option. It is better to be safe than sorry.

Connect with Reactore® to get that stitch in time. Reactore enables its users to create efficient planning and implementation through a single mining erp platform.

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