Client Profile: Canadian Coal Producer
Services Provided
- Fleet Rationalization
- Short Interval Controls
- Management System Implementation
- Operator Training
- Business Analytics
- Root Cause Analysis
Challenge
- The client needed to improve operations to take advantage of market opportunities, attract capital and protect its markets from competitors.
- Client was recovering from several periods of poor performance and near bankruptcy
- Productivity was very low due to widely varying and untracked rate performance, as well as significant amounts of idle time
- Client needed to improve its cost competitiveness and effectiveness to win a higher fraction of tenders.
Approach
- Completed rationalization analysis on equipment fleet and shipped excess/unnecessary equipment to other job sites that needed equipment.
- Revised weekly mine plan review meeting to include supervisors
- Installed short interval controls
- Incentivized crews with load count boards
- Completed several shovel training sessions for the operators with an expert shovel trainer
- Developed productivity metrics & dashboards and installed daily/weekly reviews with site management team
- Created and tracked operational delay codes to highlight operational issues
- Implemented a root cause analysis (RCA) process and completed several RCA’s for inefficiencies
Result
- $8M in total annualized savings vs. a target of $2.8M
- $5.8M in equipment productivity savings vs. a target of $600K
- $2.9M in direct labour savings vs. a target of $1.3M
- 21% increase in equipment utilization
- 11% increase in daily production
”I wasn’t sure about all this when we started but it has definitely helped. We operate totally differently now.”
- General Manager
