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Mining & Metals
Find out how the Road to Reliability™ Framework applies in the mining & metals industry.
Industry overview
Mining & Metals is one of the world’s oldest industries provides an essential input into many other industries. As of 2019 the combined revenue of the top 40 global mining companies amounted to 692 billion U.S. dollars. The industry has a wide range of plant types from open-cut and underground mines, to fixed plants, smelters, and refineries. The mobile equipment used in the mining is of a scale not used in any other industry and sets unique requirements and challenges. The fixed equipment is unique in some ways and tends to see strong wear and tear.
What is not unique is the importance of generating value from capital-intensive assets and the need to drive high reliability, high availability, whilst optimising costs, and ensuring safety.
Common maintenance & reliability challenges in mining & metals
The Mining & Metals industry is impacted by significant boom & bust cycles, more so than for example the Oil & Gas industry. This often leads to periods of severe austerity and deep cuts, and period of generous spending when commodity prices are high.That can make managing maintenance and driving reliability improvements a challenge, but it does reinforce the importance of get the basics right because they eliminate waste and make sure you deploy your scarce resources effectively and efficiently. Doing that will see an operation through the austere times in a much better shape. Then use the boom part of the cycle to invest in technologies that will further drive improvements (but keep operating costs low).
Applying the Road to Reliability™ Framework in mining & metals
And that’s exactly why the Road to Reliability™ framework is highly relevant to many companies operating across the Mining & Metals industry. It is a simple, but effective framework based that will help you to get the basics in place, the basic that really matter and that will significantly improve both your availability as well as your reliability:
- Effective planning & scheduling to increase your maintenance productivity, typically by about 35% when you go from an industry average of 30% to a more acceptable performance of 45%.
- Fit-for-purpose preventive maintenance programs that eliminate non-value adding PM tasks that have slipped in over time as a response to audit findings, equipment failures, or safety incidents.
- A focus on defect elimination and root cause analysis to ensure you steadily move from forever fixing to fixing for ever. You need to combine a simple bad actor identification process with fact-based RCA as a top-down approach to your repetitive failures. At the same time, you want your frontline to develop a defect elimination culture where minor problems are identified and resolved before they become bigger issues.
- These three basic processes need to be underpinned by effective leadership and a support culture. Without leadership you will not make progress or change, but without cultural change your improvements won’t be sustained. Unfortunately, this is an area where many maintenance managers and plant managers struggle.
And it doesn’t really matter whether you operate an offshore platform, an onshore LNG plant, a refinery or unconventional oil or gas fields, in all cases these basic practices will drive significant value. And in all cases, you can make huge improvements using your own staff.
If you want to know more about how the Road to Reliability™ framework can help you and your team improve your maintenance & reliability performance download the Road to Reliability™ eBook. Or if you’re a manager and want to train your team to make real improvements that improve your organisations bottom line Schedule a Call.
