Engineering and Mining Journal - Whether the market is copper, gold, nickel, iron ore, lead/zinc, PGM, diamonds or other commodities, E&MJ takes the lead in projecting trends, following development and reporting on the most efficient operating pr
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Wesner refers to the speed of adoption as the valley of despair. "The faster the mine gets through that period, the higher the RoI. "As the miners take ownership and become more proficient with the plan, the RoI only increases." Miners need to visualize a plan before they can embrace it. For this aspect of the training, Wesner turns to A3 Thinking, which is based on Toyota's one-page production management plans. An A3 piece of paper measures 11- x 17-in. The plan is broken into five key areas: background, what is it we are going to do and why; current situation; future conditions, what do we want it to be; the action plan, projects to address the constraints; and key performance indicators, more production, increased profits, etc. An A3 plan needs to remain simple, Wesner said. "We need people taking ownership from the beginning and they need a simple tool that they can easily reference," Wesner said. "Many organiza- tions have ongoing projects that could be incorporated into an A3 document. You don't want a 100, but you could have 10. A good strategy is to have a queue and, as one project is completed, the next one is ready to launch." The performance improvement process should eliminate unstable performance and reduce variability. "We have to man- age the noise at the beginning and get the process under control," Wesner said. Wesner recently completed perform- ance improvement programs at two large- scale mining projects. "When we first discussed our system, there was immedi- ate pushback with the mining company explaining that it had previously partici- pated in performance improvement efforts before," Wesner said. "Afterward, they admitted they have never done any- thing like this and never achieved this level of performance." Case Studies At an underground hard-rock operation in Canada, the milling side was running at 40%. It was starved for ore. The mine was able to blast three times per day. Could they get to four or five blasts per day? Wesner spent about two weeks map- ping the underground production process to build the value stream. "We started where the milling process begins and worked our way backward," Wesner said. "We mapped everything." Ore extraction involved two separate processes: devel- opment and production. The dark lines represent material flow and the dotted lines represent information flow. At the end of the value stream exercise, they had created a spaghetti chart. Several red stars can be seen on the current state value stream especially for information communication on the development side. Wesner refers to these red stars as angry clouds, which repre- sent non-value added activity. "These were opportunities for us to address," Wesner said. The angry clouds include searching for materials, waiting for mate- rials, complex materials movements, not having materials at the right place at the right time. Then they designed a chart of what they thought the process would look like 100 E&MJ; • JUNE 2014 www.e-mj.com PERFORMANCE OPITMIZATION COMPANY PROFILE-PAID ADVERTISEMENT Whether for permitting, geologic mapping, underground mining, surface mining, reserves studies, reclamation or machine control, Carlson Mining software provides powerful automation combined with remarkable ease-of- use. Here's what longtime Carlson Mining users say about the software: Brian Glackin of S&B; Industrial Minerals N.A., Inc., Berwyn, Pa., likes working with Carlson Software because it means he can work in CAD files and be in the same environment with a common language as the surveyors and outside civil engineers he works with and be able to push the same files back to them. James Hitt, a 40-year mining industry veteran, now a consulting engineer with Norwest Corp., likes the ease of use he gets with Carlson as compared to other software packages. 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And, for reclamation needs, Carlson's unique Natural Regrade program enables mining operations to not only meet, but also exceed environ- mental standards. Carlson Mining 102 West 2 nd Street Maysville, KY 41056 mining@carlsonsw.com 606-564-5028 www.carlsonsw.com/mining Solids modeling with Carlson Mining. Carlson Mining Software Solutions Easy to Use with Strong Technical Support EMJ_pg92-101_EMJ_pg92-101 6/3/14 3:17 PM Page 100