Optimised Mining Operations: Their Hour of Need

LAY OF THE LAND IN THEIR HOUR OF NEED

During the commodity boom of the past decade, the mining industry invested heavily in their infrastructure, personnel and capabilities to meet the commodity demand. Today the industry faces a shrinking and volatile market with no end date in sight for a return to the previous commodity highs. Over the past two years there has been a sharp U-turn by mining companies from capital investment to cost cutting and in many cases, sell offs, to compensate for the current drop in demand and to avoid complete closure of their businesses.

Currently, for many, the cost to mine and produce is now greater than the sale value of their mined product. Low commodity prices and demand are forcing mines to reevaluate their short and long term forecasts, reduce costs and rationalise their production to stay in business. Mines wanting to remain operational until a renewed surge in demand have required they improve resource utilisation and redefine their operational processes to survive the current volatility.

COST OF RESOURCES

Over the past three years, various global economic factors have fuelled inflation and driven up the cost of resources needed by the mining industry for their mining activities. Some of these factors include a shortage of skilled and semi-skilled labour to manage and maintain sophisticated mining equipment has led to increased labour costs. An increase in legislative tax and royalties paid out by the mines, an increase in the cost of electricity, chemicals and equipment used by the mines have all contributed in driving up the cost of mining operations.

OPTIMISING THE MINING VALUE CHAIN

The value chain of the mine, the consecutive order of activity has a domino effect. As one activity fulfilled, the next activity commences with each activity relying on the successful fulfillment of the preceding activity.

In a virtual world of planning, this always works but in reality and more so given the global challenges noted above, mining companies are having to identify and define value chains and activities that cater for the current state of the commodities industry and that also enable respective mining operations to achieved 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.  This is problematic as often requires working with non-uniform, often incomplete data and having to make timely manual interventions whilst trying to make informed manual decisions. 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. More often than not, human resource systems are not aware of the status of assets in asset management systems yet assets operated by operators and the status of one directly affects the status of the other. Various business silos remain unaware of the latest status, operating parameter and schedules being carried out across the value chain and decisions often made based on assumption and experience that is enough to maintain productivity but not enough to improve resource utilisation and increase productivity.

In order to optimise operations and reduce costs, mines need to manage their operations using consolidated and coordinated real time dataobtained from all systems across the mines estate as well as making provision for improvement of systems to capture analytical data 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 provides mining management the means to make timely, informed decisions to avert downtime, improve productivity and reduce costs.  Being able to track actual output verse budgeted output and mitigate risk with real time interventions, as variances occur, is viewed as ‘science fiction’ by most.  An example of real time management and the benefits thereof would be the ability to view processing and quality of output as it occurs at the processing plant with the means to, for management to halt processing and immediately implement required changes as opposed to enduring costly reiteration and expense from only noting and addressing variances at the end of a shift.

By consolidating operational data from various systems into a single view, mine management are empowered with the means to plan and monitor productivity from blasting through to order fulfilment as required.  Mining companies are able to plan dynamically, optimise and schedule mine planning, processing, 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.

Mining companies need to adopt a more robust and sophisticated uptake of technology to effectively monitor activity, reduce costs and increase productivity. The identification of actual costs incurred and their reduction thereof is interrelated with accurate monitoring of productivity and knowing the actual resources used in production with associated costs for each resource.  Improving the accuracy of the value chain activitiesand their scheduling, increasing maintenance efficiency and productivity of the workforce are all required in these challenging times and can only be achieved with the use of correct management tools.  Mining companies can increase productivity with cost reductions by 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.

Reactore provides an innovative, modular system with real time integration to external mining expert systems for tracking and management of all mining processes and resources utilised to achieve mine defined targets and output. Track all resources with management alerts noting those resources at an incorrect location or underperforming based on the mines predefined business process and budgeted output.  View real-time insights and analytics of all operational and business activity.  Collaborate, plan, implement and manage all your business and production processes through Reactore’s modular ERP platform for maximum resource utilisation and output.