Gaining Visibility and Control over Mining Operations: Benefits and Case Studies

摘要

Today the mining industry is facing economic challenges on many fronts, which are reinforcing the need to improve its operational practices and reduce its production costs. Operational stability, excellence and agility are important factors in achieving these goals. Achieving these three elements requires robust planning practices, strict adherence to plan, and visibility of planning and production performance across multiple departments and geographies. Mining companies and mining operations that lay the foundation beginning with stability will benefit by being able to introduce continuous incremental improvement and the ability to react rapidly to changes in the operating conditions and the market. This paper highlights how excellence in business governance is a key enabler for mining organizations to deploy solutions proven in other industries such as manufacturing in order to gain visibility and control over planning and production. In this scope, several key aspects include: collaboration across the organization, synchronizing operations across multiple departments in order to gain visibility into the current status of the work underway in the mine; improving work and production management by tracking mining activities and responding to variances in realtime. By employing dashboards and analytics using previously inaccessible or “dark data”, a quick understanding of the root cause of any deviation to the plan is gained. Such dashboards can be tailored to the specific needs of different roles such as: CxO, VP of Planning, VP of Operations, and mine, geology, and engineering managers, among others. Finally, using real case studies this paper demonstrates how using a governance platform supports the adoption of the full digital mine of the future.