BHP Mitsubishi Alliance (BMA) has developed a system for truck maintenance at the Daunia coal mine in Queensland that reduces the average downtime for a regular service from two hours to just 40 minutes.
The system potentially saves 10 hours of extra work each week for the Daunia fleet with the reduction of one hour and 20 minutes for each truck over a fortnight.
BHP uses a dedicated service bay and allows maintenance workers to prepare tooling and service kits before the trucks enter the workshop.
The mining giant also developed a technology to track its work and then reviewed the process to find areas of improvement, such as the reduction of repeated movements.
Maintainers can view every aspect of this scheduled maintenance on a custom app that runs off an iPad or iPhone, walking them through every step in an efficient and safe way.
Daunia has a fleet of 16 trucks that run 24 hours a day. Each truck needs to be serviced every 250 hours, or about every two weeks.
BHP, which introduced the system at Daunia last year, plans to roll out a similar approach for its larger, 363-tonne machines. It also intends to extend the system to bulldozer services.
The company is trialling the operating system at two other mine sites, with plans to implement it across all BHP-operated sites.
“BHP is embarking on new ways of working to improve what we do everyday. It’s called the BHP operating system and includes standardised work,” the company stated.
“This empowers frontline teams to solve problems and design solutions to streamline their processes. It also encourages greater collaboration to reduce waste, overloading and variation, and produces more effective and consistent results.”