Abstract
As mining industry professionals, our first imperative (after health and safety) is to keep our equipment running no matter what. Ore must continuously flow through our equipment at high rate! Everything preventing this must be eliminated, be it equipment failure through preventive maintenance, ore unavailability through mine planning, or non-readiness of personnel through careful management of our teams and their roles. We rarely stop and think about the efficiency of all this. We should. Let’s illustrate this with a practical example:
I was the maintenance engineer at an ore processing plant in Northern Quebec. In my plant, we had a total of 11 750 horsepower of equipment working on ore processing. Of that installed power, 32% were utilized for crushing, 37% for sorting, separating and supporting that effort. This leaves a remainder of 31% of the power. Given the utilization of the plant (and that we had to generate our electricity locally through LNG), this 31% remainder was commensurate to $5,5M in energy alone, yearly.
The 31% of energy, power and cost came from: material handling: Moving ore by pumping, conveying and feeding. Costs from failure and maintenance were also at least proportionate. Unfortunately, value is not added to the ore by moving it from point A to point B. Value is added through crushing, sorting and refining. How, then, can mining professionals like ourselves improve handling? That is, how can we reduce waste as much as possible in an already non-value-adding part of the process? I bring forward three solutions:
- Raise efficiency of handling equipment design: Less potential energy; less lining wear; more velocity.
- Use the best practices of Lean Management such as SMED and DMAIC.
- Be proficient in the phase of work identification to prevent failure.