Mining Indaba: MineRP and Deloitte Collaboration

During the February 2023 Investing in African Mining Indaba Conference, MineRP collaborated with Deloitte’s mining consulting team to showcase some of the ways our joint offerings support mining clients. MineRP has been collaborating with the Deloitte mining teams in South Africa and Canada (and to a lesser extent in Santiago Chile) before the global pandemic and have resumed our joint activities in the latter half of 2022.

During the Mining Indaba, we were invited to showcase the way that MineRP can be employed to support comprehensive data support for Deloitte’s “Insights Driven Organization” digital offering to mines. The Deloitte offering combines management KPIs for multiple processes across the organization. The specific use case we demonstrated centered around optimization of drilling, and MineRP provided Deloitte with Epiroc Certiq and Measure While Drilling data to demonstrate planned versus actual drilling performance management.

Directly linked to the Deloitte KPI dashboards were the 3D visualization of drilling in MineRP Spatial Analyzer. Information that was covered included development drilling, production drilling and bolting activities, and showcased the value of real-time data in the context of the management of the whole mining process.

Client Testimonial

In addition to the work that we jointly did during the digital showcase, Deloitte also hosted a CEO roundtable and panel discussion during which Sheron Kaviua, Vice President for Operations at Rosh Pinah Zinc Corporation gave a glowing report of the success they had with the implementation of MineRP as a platform to improve their operational planning and short interval control.

“We implemented the initiatives to support our strategy, and there were three objectives we wanted to achieve: To optimize mill performance, to reduce dilution, and to standardize across the multiple operations that Trevali had back then. The ultimate goals were to reduce cost, make the operation safer, and to provide better decision making.”

The project involved the implementation of the MineRP Platform, and the team identified three basic challenges: To integrate all data into one platform, to reduce the dilution of the ore by having a good quality blast every day, and to better understand the mine’s constraints and bottlenecks so that planning and task assignment could be improved.

An immediate opportunity was to improve dilution was drilling accuracy. Utilizing telemetry from an Epiroc Simba production drill, RPZC was able to spatially visualizes and check the accuracy of drilling before moving the machine, serving two outcomes: Firstly, monitoring and analyzing hole length and deviations compared to plan, the team was able to reduce dilution and ore loss associated with overbreak and underbreak. A directly related benefit was avoiding multiple movements of the drill in cases where corrective drilling had to occur by doing the corrections before the machine was moved - thus reducing time waste associated with unnecessary movements.

Incorporating both production and maintenance into an Integrated Operations Schedule meant that the mine could remove scheduling conflicts between production and maintenance, immediately avoiding any delays associated with bad planning. Instead, all work is now planned and executed using MineRP, and nobody does any work without the task being planned and scheduled via the Integrated Operations Schedule.