Abstract
In an increasingly competitive environment, in which social pressure for a more sustainable mining industry is increasing, the mining industry is moving towards integrated operations and digital transformation to improve operational efficiency.
Enterprises that have adopted this transformation have achieved significant gains . From a decrease in variability throughout the value chain—resulting in better productivity and lower operational costs—to the opportunity to reduce people’s exposure to dangerous environments, integrated operations and digital transformation are vital to the mining industry, particularly in the context of building new assets.
Developing a business model to integrate operations and processes requires, in part, an understanding of its effects on the people working within it. From this understanding, it is then possible to optimize personnel roles and responsibilities, workstation design, how employees are organized into teams and how their physical workspace can be configured to support the communication and collaboration required for effective integrated operations.
Human factors engineering uses knowledge from psychology and physiology to optimize individuals and teams working in safety critical environments such as defense, nuclear, transportation and mining. Applying human factors engineering principles and processes is therefore a key component in designing and implementing efficient mining organizations based on a structure of roles and responsibilities optimized to support integrated operational management.
This paper will present how C3HF and BBA are tackling this issue in developing efficient operating business models to support integrated operations in the mining segment.