Six Steps to Operational Stability

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This is Part One in a three-part series on Mining Operational Stability, by Mark Bese, Natural Resources Senior Industry Marketing Manager. This series of posts will explore the concept of “Operational Stability”, based on industry research and conversations conducted by Mike MacFarlane, former Executive Vice President Strategy and Business Planning, AngloGold Ashanti.

“Mining companies are freely giving away about 20% of their installed capital capacity because of too much variation in processes. When processes are under control, this number is between two and four percent since more of the total the potential output is realized.”
— Mike MacFarlane 
former Executive Vice President Strategy and Business Planning 
AngloGold Ashanti

The objective of Operational Stability is to reduce variation in mining processes and from the mine plan. Operational Stability is focused on improving Short Term Planning, which is often referred to as Work Management.

The primary purpose of Short Term Planning (STP) to reliably deliver on short-term plans and schedules established by the mine management. This area of planning is primarily focused on the next 30 days. Generally speaking, variation at the task execution level is driving a large percentage of the variation that results in shortfalls in short term production targets. Improving STP activities can often lead to 15 – 20% improvement in the unit costs with little or no additional capital.

The Six Steps to Operational StabilitySTP is comprised of three separate planning steps:

  1. Planning – Here we are planning all aspects of task execution down to the shift level.  We are focused on people, equipment, supplies and task location.
  2. Scheduling – Schedules all the aspects of each task on a shift-to-shift basis.
  3. Execution – All activities relating directly to task execution.

In our next post, we will examine the first two steps involved in achieving Operational Stabiliy. To learn more about this topic, download the eBook Six Steps to Operational Stability.

Stayed tuned for Part Two of the Mining Operational Stability Series, which will be posted later this month. For more blog posts by Mark Bese, check out his series on Mining Execution Excellence. UPDATE: Part Two is now online.  

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