Abstract
With significant capital investment in the Canadian mining sector there are many new and existing assets that will need to operationalize over the course of the next several years. To ensure that a mining asset is ready for operations on day one there are a series of readiness activities requiring disciplined project management and coordination across multiple disciplines. Many mining companies struggle with Operational Readiness and do not have the adequate data, documents, people, or processes in place when they launch their operations. Studies of operational readiness have shown up to 30% of the value of a capital program can be destroyed due to operational readiness failures1.
Readiness is an evolving discipline and a digitally enabled, sustainability-focused mine of the future will present some unique challenges. This presentation seeks to show the key interdependencies between the various functions in a Readiness program: Program Management, Operations, Maintenance, Engineering, Procurement, HR and Financial Controls. Furthermore, the presentation will detail where many mining companies face some typical challenges in running a Readiness program and how to mitigate their risks:
- Late start of readiness activities, key activities are missed or not done to required quality.
- Ensuring value from data by integrating digital tools into processes, use cases.
- Readiness teams working in silos without understanding of interdependencies or integrated view of the operations.
- Alignment on standards for technical documentation: asset strategies, task lists, master data
- Translating readiness processes to the site, building sustainability targets into the operations, ensuring the site team is ready on day one.
1 Deloitte (2012) “Effective Operational Readiness of Large Mining Capital Projects – Avoiding value leakage in the transition from project execution into operations”