Abstract
Fact: Asset maintenance strategies are crucial for the mining industry because it minimizes the risk of asset failure and maximizes the safety of employees. Downtime events negatively impact more than just production – from unsafe operations to customer dissatisfaction.
The challenges in mining maintenance are well known: The high impact in the operational costs (up to 50%), and reactive maintenance is still the most common approach to problem-solving. Additionally, there is limited use of the data generated by processes and equipment for proper maintenance decision making.
In addition, Maintenance, as practice, has evolved significantly in the last 50 years, but most companies struggle to get to world class maintenance management.
We believe with today’s available data, computational power, and analytics strategies, we can leverage digital technologies to automate most of the maintenance practices and address some of the challenges pointed out.
However, the quest of leveraging digital tools for maintenance can create severe side effects like the proliferation of APM (Asset Performance Management) Solutions: home-grown systems, proprietary platforms with limited reach, isolated initiatives, or complex endeavors not fit for the daily operations of the maintenance crews.
The objective of this paper is to define the future of truly unified APM technologies and its capabilities of data capture, integration, visualization, notification and analytics and how to combine data science and process / domain expertise to create simple but powerful tools to be adopted by the entire organization.