Maintenance Strategy Development & Optimisation: Mining equipment

Case Study Details

Client: Confidential

Industry: Mining

Location: South Africa | Zimbabwe | Botswana

Year Completed: 2018-Ongoing

Project Summary

A major Mining Operator in South Africa was seeking to enable and sustain significant increase of equipment performance at the operating sites across Diamond, Platinum, Coal and Iron Ore commodities. The sites are experiencing excessive equipment downtime and poor asset reliability and availability due to ineffective maintenance strategies.

Optimal were engaged in 2018 to develop plant/equipment hierarchies, conduct criticality analysis, Failure Mode Effects and Criticality Analysis (FMECA) followed by Reliability Centred Maintenance (RCM) procedures, and spares analysis across their sites. The project is still ongoing and being rolled to multiple sites and assets.

Our team of Reliability Engineers are deployed to the various sites and work directly with the key client stakeholders to facilitate maintenance strategy development utilising Reliability Centred Maintenance techniques.

Key Benefits | Outcomes

The project is delivering the following:

Up to date asset registers and plant hierarchy with equipment subdivisions
Fully defined functional locations with equipment and Bills of Material (BoMs)
Internal risk matrix driven criticality and failure modes that are aligned to maintenance tasks
Strategy based maintenance plans with site scheduling data and activity for scheduled work
Maintenance work packages with labour and material resource allocation
Activity based maintenance cost with determined budgeted lives for technical objects
Detailed spares list covering stock or non-stock items as well as an optimised critical spares lists. Assigned ABC classification for inventory management, lead time and procurement quantity.

Overall, as part of this project, Optimal has become a trusted partner for the client with the new maintenance regimes leading to equipment availability and reliability increase of 15% on average across the sites and subsequent maintenance cost savings.

Case Study Details