In the recent movie Pete’s Dragon, a character exclaims: “If you go through life seeing just what’s in front of you, you’re going to miss a lot.” In mining, this can easily apply to the limited version of reality reporting provides to managers and executives.
Real Time information
What is really required to inform decision-making is real time data and confidence in it. This is made possible by Mine Production Management systems, which also help identify areas for improvement and sustain productivity gains. These systems deliver the details behind the numbers, to allow for comparisons of performance and the setting of threshold alerts when variance occurs.
While many mine sites think that the reporting they have from geology, scheduling, fleet management, and other areas provides them with the details they need to understand how well the operation is performing, it doesn’t. The information contained within these reports is too late to be actioned upon because they do not allow recipients to see issues that happen within shifts as they occur. 
An integrated view
Further, they do not provide an integrated view of the operation. Without this, a real picture of performance and what is influencing problems is never visible. Mine Production Management, on the other hand, brings visibility into performance management by integrating data from across domains, validating it according to business rules, and making it available in real time. With this, comparisons can be made within shift to preset benchmark thresholds, alerting managers to problems as they occur. Using drill down capabilities, not only can causality be identified, patterns emerge, and productivity improvements identified and tracked.
To learn more about Mine Production Management, watch “Beyond the Control of Operations with Mine Production Management”, with Dassault Systèmes’ Paul Fenner.
On the web: 3DS.com/natural-resources/
