Mining Production Optimization System

The challenge

The customer is a contract miner for a number of southern African mining companies, mainly open-pit diamond operations. It is a low-cost operator that allows its clients to keep production costs to a minimum. It had made a large investment in heavy earth-moving equipment.

The business faces two key challenges:

* Optimising utilisation of this high-value plant; and
* Tracking production against contract obligations.

It had a manual field recording process for its operation, which fed spreadsheets for reporting purposes. This was error-prone, slow, and provided ineffective reporting. Plant operating hours and downtime reasons were difficult to track, tonnages were inconsistent and diesel usage was largely unknown until year-end recons, and unpredictable as a result.

In a rapidly-growing business, this was unacceptable, and the decision was made to deploy a system to capture production statistics onsite and to provide production reports both onsite and to head office. Youngblood Consultants was engaged, and it proposed its customisable solution based on the Microsoft SQL Server stack.

The solution

The system enables field capture of engine hours, downtime with reasons, fuel uptake and production statistics. Production can be defined as any unit of measure - the client uses "tonnes" for load and haul, and "metres" for blasting. Conversion factors can be applied.

Full dashboarded reporting is provided, which enables downtime analysis, plotting of production actuals against contracts, maintenance triggers for plant and diesel consumption trends. An order tracking facility is available for spares ordered for a plant that is unserviceable as a result of breakage.

The customer has been able to maximise its plant uptime (identifying operator absenteeism as a major cause of downtime) and to reduce its planned capex for the new plant significantly. Planned maintenance based on actual plant hours has resulted in less downtime as well. The customer's quoting for new projects has achieved new levels of accuracy based on information recorded through the system, and its competitiveness in winning new business significantly enhanced as a result.

The Mining Production Optimization System is offered as a business intelligence solution with a browser-based user interface. It provides a simple, flexible and low-cost solution to production field reporting challenges, combined with excellent customisable visuals and reports for management purposes.