Good communication is key to an efficient production chain. The new products from Mobilaris are set to give everybody in the mine access to real-time information.
Mobilaris Mining & Civil Engineering empowers people in mining operations
In mines without any good communication infrastructure and without any means for tracking of assets, productivity is usually low and hard to increase due to a big lack of information and transparency during a shift. Here, you can say that situational awareness is, at its best, limited to a poor and noisy radio channel.
However, even in mines that are regarded to be in the forefront of technology with a good communication and positioning infrastructure, information is still not for all. Usually a miner does not know about the whereabouts of colleagues, nor where machines, equipment or vehicles are. In best cases, you can call up to the control room and ask for information – if they have time.
Congested control rooms
At the control room of an average size mine, perhaps with 100+ miners in the shift, the operators in the control room would be drowned with giving answers to simple questions if all the miners had phones. The logic is clear:
- Little spread or use of information -> little or no communication which leads to a lot of wasted time as people do not communicate.
- A good communication network and a good spread of mine phones -> higher degree of communication to the control room where the information reside. This can reduce time wasted to a high degree, but the drawback is that this could lead to a stressful situation in the control room and less focus on important tasks.
Mobilaris MCE: Information is for everybody
Enter Mobilaris Onboard and Mobilaris Pocket Mine. With these new products, any miner will be able to know what is going on in the mine.
Running on standard tablets or smartphones, the Mobilaris Onboard and Mobilaris Pocket Mine get all the real-time information about personnel, equipment and vehicles from the centralised Mobilaris Mining Intelligence solution. All asset information including mine maps is shown in 3D and is locally stored persistently on the tablets so that you can use it even when you are out of network.
Investigations have shown that a lot of the wasted time that decrease productivity in underground mining can be avoided if personnel have the necessary information at hands. A recent business case project in a Canadian mine showed that some of the values demonstrated by introducing Mobilaris Mining Intelligence were:
- Before, 75 per cent of the time looking for equipment would take anywhere from 20 min – two hours, and the remaining 25 per cent greater than two hours to several shifts. This represented a significant loss of productive time in a typical 12-hour shift. Using Mobilaris Mining Intelligence, equipment could be localised instantly instead.
- During line-up meetings supervisors describe verbally where a piece of equipment of tool can be found. The description is usually loose in detail, with no visual aids or data on specific location. Use of Mobilaris Mining Intelligence would greatly reduce this waste of time as exact location can be prescribed and visually presented in a line-up meeting.
- Increased ability to have resources at the right place at the right time.
- The ability to monitor in real time if work is being done to standard, and when it begins to deviate from standard, act on it.
The ability to re-assign assets to meet production targets if actual performance is falling behind targets – before the shift ends.
These are all examples from introducing the Mobilaris Mining Intelligence in a control room. But, think about the effect when this increased transparency scales-up and empowers everyone in the mine. Now the tools are here, enter Mobilaris Onboard and Mobilaris Pocket Mine.