True digitalization of underground mines with double digit productivity increases

The total time utilization of capital equipment in underground mines is today below 50%. How can it be raised?

It’s about going digital – to carry out the digitalization of its operations. It’s about re-engineering the shift, it’s about going Operations Excellence. All synchronized in a digitalization roadmap.

Here are our top-10 advice in the start of and during your journey ahead.

Experience improved throughput and face utilization combined with game-changing safety and incident prevention. We are talking Mobilaris Mining Intelligence™ (MMI).


1. Think BIG – implement small – move fast
Define your long-term and medium-term vision. Digitalization is only a tool to fulfill your main corporate goals. Goals will be increased over time, even disrupted. Our advice is to kill your pains before executing your gains. Choose your partner that has an approach, competence and a product offering that is based on openness and customer-driven evolution. That’s why we integrate and keep the pace. With the aim of being a future-proof solution for the customer.

2. Standardized infrastructure
Digitalization often starts with implementation of communication infrastructure in order to distribute information to everyone in the mine. Every underground mine is unique and uses a mix of network infrastructure in different areas or levels of a mine. Implement standardized infrastructure solutions, not an infrastructure that is proprietary and bundled with the product.



3. Seeing is knowing
Allow individuals, in every location of a mine, to take decisions based on real-time information & status. Achieving production efficiency and safer mines places higher demands on information management and the visibility of operations.

4. Minimize the gap between planning and reality
Synchronize the planned activities with actual status real-time instead of getting feedback after a completed work shift. Whenever a disturbance is detected in the active shift, it is very important to mitigate the situation and try to save the shift as fast as possible. Implement a digital process that integrates planning, dispatching and real-time feedback from machine operators against planned work orders.



5. Implement metrics as a start to reduce waste time
You must know your baseline to be able to improve. “We are planned to blast the rounds now but there seems to be a couple of guys missing. Where are they?” 65 personnel waited 15 min for 2 guys to appear, lost 16.5 hours. “I was told to repair the Scaler here but there is no Scaler in sight.” Wasted time in locating the Scaler, lost 1hour. That is only two examples of waste time.

Blast ventilation/re-entry, machine break-downs, shift changes, looking for equipment/machines, waiting for truck/breaker, lunch breaks and travel time within the mine reduce face utilization. You know that, but do you have hard numbers on it?

6. Automate the retrieval of productivity data from your machines
With the outputs from machines, the shift plan and possible manual inputs, you will be able to analyze the differences. These results will both be valuable input to your further planning as well as improvements of your work processes. This will enable better fleet management with increased systems utilization.

7. Traffic awareness
Investigate how traffic awareness will affect your productivity. Using the new ground breaking innovation – Mobilaris Onboard™, operators of machines, drivers of trucks and vehicles will become aware of the current traffic situation ahead of them. By this, we estimate that 75+ % of the traffic congestions can be avoided without the need for expensive high accuracy positioning technologies.



8. Start using data for automation
A good example is Ventilation on Demand. By combining geofences and control systems for ventilation, an efficient Ventilation on Demand solution can be made. As one good benchmark, Boliden decreased their ventilation energy cost with 54% and an additional 21% decrease of the propane gas consumption (to preheat the air) by using MMI integrated with the ventilation control system.

9. Reduce evacuation time
What if you could reduce it with 25-50%? What if you could reduce the number of incidents per year that needs evacuation? Where is everyone? Who is safe, who is not? To know how many people that are in a big zone is not enough! The faster the evacuation is completed, the faster the mine will return to productivity and the lower the lost will be. After an evacuation, re-play and analyze the event in order to improve your procedures. We know it can be done. Watch a movie where Emergency Services in Skellefteå and our customer Boliden explore on this subject.

10. Predictable operations leading to productivity increases
Update your processes in order to get more predictable operations. When having that in place, increased productivity will follow. Invite us to be part of this.