I
n October 2012 at Golden, Colorado, I
asked about 80 mining operations
professionals from all over the US and
Canada three questions. They were at
the Colorado School of Mines to hear my
take on the tenmost important actions
leading to best practice truck-and-loader
operations. Absent frommy top ten was
the use of fleet management systems – a
fact I will return to later. But the three
questions were related to this:
n
Question 1:
Howmany people have
fleet management systems in place?
n
Question 2:
Howmany are using
the automated dispatching part of the
systems?
n
Question 3:
Why not?
The answers to these questions are later
in this article. Before we get to them, I would
like to explain why fleet management
systems are so important for optimising our
truck and loader operations.
Ineffective strategies
One of the key strengths of using
equipment-level data is the ability to assess
the effectiveness of mining strategy. This can
be done across the industry or for an
individual mine.
Mining companies tend to adopt one of
two main business strategies to maximise
company returns: a volume strategy
(achieving the maximum output despite
increasing marginal costs) or a cost strategy
(minimising marginal costs and accepting
optimised output volumes). When
implemented effectively, these strategies
follow a typical pattern of equipment use.
Under a volume strategy, an increase in
loader output and a decrease in truck output
usually occurs. This is because companies
will invest inmore trucks to ensure there is
no idle time at the loader. One consequence,
however, is that trucks often sit idle, waiting
for their turn to be loaded.
Under a cost strategy, the opposite is the
case: a high focus on costs generally means
fewer – but more highly utilised – trucks,
while it is the loaders that often sit idle
waiting for them.
However, analysis of equipment
productivity shows that, overall, the
industry has not been very effective in the
Graham Lumley, PwC Australia,
explains why fleet management
systems should be one of the most
important tools for improving
mine efficiency – and why they are
currently failing to be so.
Missingthe
point
Missingthe
point
September 2014
|
World Coal
|
25
