Gold Mining MOS Implementation
Visual management delivers significant commercial benefits
- 3 minutes read
Our client is a mid-tier ASX-listed gold mining company operating seven assets in Queensland, New South Wales, and Western Australia in Australia and Ontario in Canada. Its vision is to ” create a premier global gold company.”
Having grown predominantly through acquisition, the company’s executive team recognised a need to develop a Mining Operating System (MOS) to embed consistent operating practices across all assets while increasing commercial performance outcomes.
Phase one of the program would implement tiered visual management forums across five wholly owned Australian assets to stabilise operational performance from mine to mill, increase capacity, reduce cost and foster a continuous improvement culture.
$45M
$1.2M
2,600t
$200K
The approach
With three sites in regional Queensland, one in New South Wales and one in Western Australia, ORBIZ deployed a full-time consultant to each location to work alongside the local leadership teams whilst establishing overall governance with the chief operating officer through the Sydney head office.
The project started at a pilot site in Queensland to trial the approach with the client’s workforce and design and test the visual management system to enable faster deployment at future sites.
Workshops were facilitated with each local leadership team to map the value stream from mine to mill, studying the flow and understanding where the constraints and improvement opportunities. This approach allowed each site to define the performance metrics they would use to manage their operation.
The solutions
Each site implemented a tiered system of Visual Performance Centres (VPC), with Level 1 being the site level VPC owned by the general manager and a series of Level 2 VPCs owned by each department manager.
Project Performance Centres were introduced to provide structure and governance to capital projects and large improvement initiatives that required cross-functional collaboration. One site utilised this system to stabilise and accelerate its Life of Mine program, which required the exploration of twenty-three mining tenements to be planned and executed.
The project also produced a series of unplanned initiatives, including a simple ideas generation and implementation process to improve safety, productivity and cost performance embraced by one site as a component of its “Act Like an Owner” program.
This visual process engaged the workforce in submitting ideas to be assessed using a cost-benefit matrix. Then, ownership was assigned for implementation with a tracking system and originator feedback.
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