Formalized application of business process improvement tools to mining

摘要

The extractive industries of mining, quarrying, and mineral processing have initiated and utilized formalized organizational improvement initiatives to improve profit and worker safety and health. Miners extract and process commodities taking the price established by the external marketplace. Within controllable areas of the mining business, the best strategy remains to affect the cost side by continuous improvement, so it is critical that today's mine safety, productivity, and cost performance be better than the day before. To this end, the mining industry has found and implemented a tool set to affect change called Business Process Improvement (BPI). BPI tool sets utilized in mining frequently are derived from Six Sigma, the system started by Motorola, but are applied in different ways. The purpose of this article is to review the use of BPI programs in the extractive industries, evaluate how current BPI success can be sustained, and consider if the life-cycle phase for a product consisting of introduction, growth, maturity, and decline has applicability in mining BPI organizational development.