Downer has made the largest single purchase in MineWare’s history by ordering 23 Argus hydraulic monitoring systems for its operations.
Argus, an advanced monitoring system for electric and hydraulic loaders, manages payload, mine compliance, machine health and situational awareness.
The system improves productivity by three to 16 per cent, significantly lowering the cost per tonne of material moved, according to MineWare vice president – marketing and sales, Roy Pater.
“As one of Australia’s leading mining contractors, Downer has placed a major focus on extending its leadership as a contract miner through the full adoption of technology,” Pater said.
MineWare’s holistic approach supports productivity improvement across the entire value chain, integrating operating systems and sharing knowledge between departments to break down the silos.
“A key priority for Downer is to have our hydraulic fleet optimising its payload and digging to plan, and more importantly, to have this information visible throughout our organisation, as well as at our mine sites,” Downer technology support specialist Nicholas Duggan added.
“We also know MineWare provides us with dedicated mining engineers to help us continually improve productivity over time and field support teams on the ground to provide rapid response to technical issues.”
MineWare, a Komatsu member company, is constantly working on closing the feedback loop between the upstream and downstream mining processes and making this real time.
“By doing this, our customers will see the real benefits of system integration and collaboration between various technology vendors, mining contractors and the mine’s departments,” Pater said.
“All of this is key to attaining the next level of productivity gains that mining is looking for. From benchmarking operator performance to optimising machine health, it’s about measuring what’s happening on board and in the pit, and applying those insights to deliver continuous improvement.”