Case Study: NRW Civil & Mining unlocks data

NRW Civil & Mining has unlocked data, enabling it to find improved ways of creating business decisions and efficiencies while building out its safety and sustainability.

The Perth-based civil and mining contractors company partnered with data platform MaxMine to introduce a technology solution at its Karara mine site to help reduce greenhouse gas emissions and uplift operations.

Rick Jorge, senior mining engineer at NRW Civil & Mining told Digital Nation the decision to first implement the MaxMine platform at its Karara iron ore mining site was influenced by the successful deployment at one of its other locations, Dalgaranga, in Western Australia.

“We thought that it was our turn to take on the next step to try and improve efficiencies across the fleet.

“Initially, the main focus was trying to improve and enhance operator behaviour, particularly within our truck fleet, which was just looking at maximizing our haulage efficiency while also maximising safety within the crew.

“On that side of it, we were able to essentially improve the efficiency of our haulage cycle and our trucks and then moved on to our load-specific goals,” Jorge said.

This included loading times, overall efficiencies in the load areas and tracking trucks and load ticket requests.

From the initial implementation, the mining company has seen a 96 percent improvement in transport efficiencies.

Implementation discussions were held through a committee comprised of the upper management team and MaxMine representatives to outline targets and outcomes.

“We took those goals, moved forward and were able to implement things like a truck league, which essentially gave the truckers, the operators, a score on how they were performing in regards to their efficiency, their speed, and in regards to how safe they were running to ensure that the trucks, the tyres and the roads weren't experiencing over the top degradation.

“Essentially, we're able to improve our average haulage efficiency scores from 73 percent to 96 percent, so a fantastic improvement within the first few months.”

"From this improvement the team were able to analyse exactly how long they were taking to load, how efficient they were regarding their loading

"Then from there understand exactly, for example, how many is the perfect amount of trucks in every cycle and what the queue times are, what the loading time would be”.

He added the company is now able to “pretty much make data-driven decisions based on that.”

Jorge added the new system is now providing people data that “just didn't exist and data that is good.”

“It was something tangible that we could offer to our operators that they could look at and say, where am I lacking? where can I improve? and even where am I doing fantastic?

“On the same note, it's something that we can provide the supervisors, upper management, something to be able to highlight where people are shining and …. how they can improve as well.”

Staff adoption rates have been “incredible”, according to Jorge.

Moving forward the team are looking further into inventory maintenance and safety amongst other projects.

“The next steps of where you want to go further is really as far as your imagination can take you. Currently, a big push for us is monitoring our queue times, monitoring our idle times, monitoring our fuel burn … and how those all are related.

“The idea behind that is essentially we want to reduce the amount of fuel we're burning, reduce our carbon emissions by being more efficient.

“If we've got machines sitting there running without actually working, they're essentially burning fuel for no good reason, so we're really pushing towards improving our efficiency.

“Particularly for our ancillary fleet … working on those and ensuring that we're once again taking that next step further to improve sustainability and reduce the carbon footprint that we have.”

Jorge said the company has been able to find new opportunities with the unlocked data.

“It allows you to go as deep or as shallow as you want to go with it and they're able to provide reports to assist in doing that.

“It’s afforded us the opportunity to make much more data-driven decisions which wasn't something that was really an option in a lot of little sections within this mining sector.

He added the company not only boosted its ability to run efficiently but “improved our ability to run safely and our ability to push towards forward-looking incentives to maintain sustainability”. 

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