Mining Excavator Reliability Improvement
Daily preventative maintenance strategy increases excavator reliability
- 3 minutes read
Our client is Australia’s largest gold producer, with a rich history in gold mining dating back to the 1960s. It operates in Australia, Canada, and Papua New Guinea. The client owns and operates predominantly low-cost, long-life mines using various mining methods for large ore bodies and selective underground mining to optimise the production of high-grade deposits.
Operational performance at our client’s PNG operation was severely impacted by two aging and unreliable hydraulic excavators, the primary dig units on site.
Information collected by the site reliability team provided a series of insights:
- The most frequent breakdowns were ‘short and quick’ to repair failure events.
- Servicing was completed twice weekly but target reliability outcomes were not being met.
- Despite the service intervals, maintenance debt was accumulating on the excavators.
68%
66%
The approach
From a series of investigations, it was agreed that introducing daily servicing would improve the Mean Time Between Failure performance. While this had been proposed on multiple occasions in the past, a successful pathway to implementation had not been found.
A comprehensive and structured engagement process clearly defined the current state, and the local maintenance team developed a detailed practical solution.
With a much clearer view of the situation, the team recognised that with small improvements to the servicing timetable, they could assist the mine operations team in alleviating one of the most significant bottlenecks being experienced in the production areas.
The solutions
As the current state was now visualised and properly understood, all stakeholders had a shared understanding of what actions were required. This enabled the corrective actions of multiple departments to be effectively coordinated and implementation to occur in an organised and controlled manner.
A structured change management process ensured that individual concerns were addressed and changes discussed in an open environment whereby any issues could be worked through to ensure complete alignment. With a change management process established, the entire activity was visually planned and presented to ensure team members could identify their part of the overall project and how it linked with the higher-level schedule.
A key component of this activity and its successful outcome was the revised daily service schedule, which ensured maintenance was undertaken during the production shift handover period and did not interfere with production teams and equipment utilisation.
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