MEC representatives attended the Gala Dinner held by Young Mining Professionals Brisbane.
What follows is a series of short articles on mine scheduling. Like any good posts, they should include some storytelling and so I’m going to kick off with a story that was pivotal in many of my learnings about mine scheduling.
Anyone in the investing world has tales to tell of the bear and bull years while mining is synonymous with boom or bust years.
They are the behemoths of the mining landscape and each year the major players manage to make them bigger, faster, more operationally efficient and even more comfortable.
How would you describe your organisation’s safety culture? And how important is it to the safety and profitability of your mining operations?
Never has the modern world been more volatile than at the current time. Anxiety and uncertainty have rocked industries and businesses, in fact, all communities. But now is probably the perfect time to prepare for a return to a more stable working platform and consider ways to get your team re-engaged and ready for a new phase of productivity.
In a truck shovel operation, all we ever talk about is the excavator. We schedule the excavator, measure it's productivity, compare various models and make judgements about which ones perform best. But In fact, the excavator doesn't put any material in the dump or stockpile, its the trucks that do all the work and incur most of the cost of moving the material. So we should really be looking at which is the best truck to use. Assuming that the truck and excavator size are appropriately matched (between 3 and 5 bucket passes to fill a truck), the performance of the excavator only comes into the equation during loading which is perhaps 2 minutes out of a total truck cycle time of 20 minutes. So if the excavator hits some hard dig and takes 3 minutes to load a truck, the excavator productivity will fall by 50% but the truck productivity will only fall by 5% which hardly affects the unit cost of the operation.
What is the biggest factor that you could control at an open cut coal mine to generate return? For me it would be loss and dilution. Small improvements deliver big increases in cash generation, usually at minimal or no additional cost. Commonly, most of the coal losses occur at top of coal as blast energy breaks up the coal and makes it difficult to separate cleanly from the waste. Big gains can be made by improving blasting practices to avoid fracturing the coal.
Extractive industries are, by the very nature, a set of defined and repeatable processes to meet the business objectives. Typically, within each process are Drivers eg. Labour Rosters, Geological and Geotechnical factors which impact negatively on business costs. Then there are the Levers eg. Physical factors, Process Cycle and Operating time and affecting rates and hence Productivity.
Decision making is often a complex series of processes which may result in a "less than optimal" business outcome. Whilst there are tools to support and rationalise the process such as Multi Criteria Decision Analysis, the real value can be realised and optimised using a Trade Off Study approach. The outcome is logical and auditable to inform the best decision for the business.