Business Challenge

Despite significant investments in capital and business process improvement projects, many mining operations struggle to deliver reliable performance from the frontline each shift. There can be so much variability in performance that operations managers often can’t predict whether they will get 0% or 100% of the potential of a key production machine each shift. And as we all know, consistently high performing sites are key to attracting investment.

Establishing an operational backbone allows operations to reduce this variability; improve average performance and helps mines achieve big improvements without spending any capital.  Once this kind of stability has been established, business improvement initiatives and capital projects can sit on a stable operational foundation. This stability means they will, when invested in, deliver sustained, long term results.

In this paper, we look at the three essential steps operations need to take to gain control of day-to-day operations and why this needs to precede investing capital in new equipment or processes. This has helped management teams to improve production and development performance by over 20% within a couple of months.