“Fill the Mill” How effective analytics will drive productivity and reduce costs By Jeff Armstrong, Director of Strategic Industries, Jump Analytics
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n an industry that is demanding, competitive, and always evolving, mining companies need to maximize their production efficiency. To meet this objective, mine operators need to rely on the unbiased truths of accurate data to support and drive their decision making. The advanced applications of technology are allowing the industry to look at ways to drive automation and efficient processes when it comes to data collection, data streaming, and data analytics. However, many mining companies face challenges in pulling together data from the various systems used to run their mine sites. They often spend too much time performing manual data pulls and manual data reconciliations, leading to untimely and inaccurate reporting. This, in turn can lead to inefficiencies and worse, safety issues.
In order to optimize productivity and mitigate risks, companies must be able to access clean, accurate data from each area of their operations, consolidate and align views of that data, and present those views in timely, automated, and accurate reports. This adjustment allows companies to be proactive with their data rather than reactive. Let’s look at just one scenario faced by mining companies.
Putting analytics to work In the world of mining, safety is priority number one. Period. Next on the scale of importance, hitting your operational targets is what drives the business forward. Setting your targets, yes that’s the easy part, but knowing with certainty what affects your chances of hitting or exceeding your target can be
challenging, given the unlimited variables interrelated to the target at hand.“Fill the mill” they say! Okay, let’s go! Let us assume the scenario of material movement. You added 10 per cent more capacity to the fleet, and they have been 100 per cent available for the past two weeks, but there’s barely been an increase in material moved. Okay, looking at the data for these haul trucks, it seems to show that the effective use of the fleet has gone down. Having this data readily available will allow you to adjust, make the changes necessary, course correct, and reach the overall objective of filling the mill. Simply adding to the fleet wasn’t the answer. Improving effective use? Bingo! A data analytics solution like the Jump Mine Analytics Framework will help bring this information to the forefront. But wait, further upstream, the “fill the mill” initiative has stalled. Stockpiles are empty, and the equipment effectiveness is even worse than yours was. Had their initiative been shared, had their historical numbers been known and used in combination with material movement data, an action plan could have been developed with historical data from the two links in the chain. Used for analysis, fill the mill would be a success with less chance of unforeseen bottlenecks.
44 Mining North of 60 | 2021
