14 _ QUARRY SA | MARCH/APRIL 2018
South African Minister of Mineral Resources, Mosebenzi Zwane, delivered the welcome address
at the Mining Indaba.
Olusegun Obasanjo, the former President of Nigeria and chairman of the Brenthurst
Foundation, delivered a keynote address entitled ‘Partnership: A New Narrative for Africa’s
Mining Industry’.
production. Typically, all the assets update
every 10 seconds, you can see how they
move, you can fence in various areas – where
they dump, where they load, what material
type is associated with particular loaders, but
more importantly, you can track maintenance
and operational delays.”
“We can also cater to most vehicles, so if
every vehicle on your site has a device, why
not have them on the platform. Then you've
got a full GIS with your mine plan overlay,
together with your drone photos. There's a lot
of focus and attention on big mines, but our
technology works well for the smaller quarries
as well,” he added.
“We have worked with one seven-ADT
quarry, and they've got four managers on
site, so everything’s observable, everything's
managed, everything’s kind of under control.
But they can't measure it because they
don’t have stopwatches and eight hands the
whole time. So for their R20 000 a month,
they got R220 000 back just in cost savings
on managing their contractors correctly.
That's without considering the utilisation
optimisation that we did on their load and
haulers, so they're getting 10 times the
system costs back every single month just by
using our platform. And through increasing
their communication and aligning them
around the same KPIs, we dropped all their
overtime hours.”
This focus on the data that is currently
available, and what we can do with it,
carried over into other sessions, with
SRK Consulting (SA) chairman William
Joughin presenting a range of technological
innovations developed and applied by SRK in
its mining project work. Joughin highlighted
the need for mines to embrace these advances
as active participants in the fourth industrial
revolution, and also looked at how data can
form an important part of a mine’s planning.
“Larger quantities of better and more reliable
data – combined with specialised and in-
depth engineering experience – are a real
step-change in our ability to understand and
manage project risk,” he said.
“Today’s technology gives us the power
to collect and analyse data in previously
unimaginable quantities – and with
remarkable benefits. We have used drones and
photogrammetry, for instance, for mapping
geological structures – giving us a better
understanding of the geology and more
reliable resource definition. This, in turn, helps
mines manage geotechnical risks such as slope
stability, as more data means more accurate
interpretation of geological structures.”
African
MINING INDABA 2018
Day one of Investing in African Mining Indaba was an optimistic affair, with more delegates in
attendance than in previous years.