Por: Juan Carlos Valle Morales, Ingeniero Industrial y de Sistemas.

Abstract

In the mining industry, it is vitally important to link a mining plan with its cost to evaluate the best scenario. From the beginning to the end of the planning process, timelines are developed to not only deliver results in terms of tons and grades but also to deliver cost efficiencies to the mining operations. 

The basic principles of costing and productivity in mining have not changed from the days of manual labor to mega operations with economies of scale. Therefore, we can take advantage of those levers that can impact the total operating cost of an equipment used to carry out a mining process, such as drilling, loading, haulage, etc. 

These levers can be grouped into the following activities:

• Increase of effective time (hours).

• Increase of productivity (units per hour).

• Rework reduction (production quality).

The first activity is achieved by defining a time usage model (TUM) to assign time categories to classify the collected hours that mine equipment use for their daily operation. The model succeeds in distilling all the information that is collected so that it can be consistently communicated, reported and analyzed. 

The second activity is a consequence of the consistent use of the TUM, since an increase in effective time due to the decrease of unplanned unproductive time will increase production and equipment productivity. 

The third activity, which is also related to the TUM, allows through the analysis of unit costs to highlight the quality of the production process, by understanding the additional cost that occurs due to rework. 

In short, we want to show that an adequate management of information to manage equipment time, through a time usage model (TUM), allows to generate a higher production, improve productivity, reduce the waste of rework (Improve Quality) and achieve cost efficiency.