ENVIRONMENT IN FOCUS
CAN TECHNOLOGY HELP MINING
QUARRIES WIN THE WAR ON
ABSENTEEISM?
Dr Doug Potter, director of Predictive
Safety South Africa.
We have all heard of the ripple effect. The theory that one action
causes the continuing and spreading of an event or action. It’s
like dropping a pebble in the water and watching the ripples
flow far past where the pebble drop occurred.
By Dr Doug Potter
Roodepoort Crushers — a quarry featured in this month’s Winning feature (page 17). Measuring fatigue levels of employees is critical to occupational
health and safety on a quarry.
I
n absenteeism, we start off with a full
team on day one and every GM has
a smile on their face as every job is
covered. But then comes real life. In real
life, family members get cancer, parents
get placed in old age homes, and children
have accidents, all requiring employees to
take time off work beyond their sick days.
We ask ourselves, if all mines are
expected to run 24/7, how are we
supposed to handle absenteeism and
make sure the equipment keeps running
without working our staff into the ground
they are pulling out?
34_QUARRY SA | MAY/JUNE 2019
The first answer would be to over-
complement our mining staff with
many workers that are multiskilled
and cross-trained in other areas of the
mine. There is a system that has been
piloted in hospitals called Smart Relief,
which has been in use for two years
now. It is a software program that looks
at all the human resources data. When
an employee calls in sick or takes off
for vacation, the computer looks for
employees that have the same job code
and sends a list out in order of which
employee has the least number of hours
at work. This process makes sure we have
the freshest employees at work. If the
organisation has a skeleton crew and
working short-staffed, it then searches for
an employee that has most of the skills
needed to perform that task and once
again double-checked against hours of
work.
Smart Relief also has a regulation
program installed. This will allow
one to put in the basic conditions of
employment, Department of Mineral
Resources (DMR) regulations, hospital
regulations, or nuclear regulatory
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