Abstract:

Ausenco and Agnico Eagle partnered to develop and execute a Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) project on the 32-unit long-haul trucks fleet at the Meadowbank mine in Nunavut, Canada, which had been a bottleneck in terms of cost and availability. Despite the investments, failure rate on the LHT fleet was significantly higher than on the other hauling fleet. The project looked at strategies to preserve the functionality of the trucks, classifying/identifying where failures occurred, prioritizing the failures, and selecting the most effective maintenance tasks for the failures ranked highest in importance.

The scope of work included:

1.Identifying, investigating and defining failures: looking into component failures to investigate causes and the proper reliability response. Using a proprietary software, a component hierarchy was built to document all failures.

2.Measure and analyze: The failures were then documented into a component hierarchy (more than 28,000 work orders and 44,000 parts transactions). Failure downtime was classified, and bad actors and instances of over-maintenance were identified.

3.Implementation of improvements to optimize the performance of bad actors and reduce over-maintenance, also looking at optimizing maintenance tasks and intervals and improving the process for work orders.

4.Implementation of control measures: KPIs were defined to evaluate performance, developed an annual resource plan, and proposed future improvements.

The results were:

1.Reduced downtime: Availability gain of 2.9%; Estimated 8,000h/y reduction in equipment downtime; Provided an option to park one unit to achieve cost savings.

2.Reduced workload: 14,000h preventive maintenance workload reduction (440h/unit).

3.Parts & lubes: Consumption reduction of $220K/year.

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M. Emmanuel Tran

Biography