Published in June 2006 Australian Longwall Magazine

Its success depends heavily on mine management commitment and key personnel to own and drive improvement. Mines that have successfully adopted the approach lead the way in development production rates.

KASAH Consulting has implemented paper-based process management approaches at several coal mines with varied results. “Success comes when the end user operates and measures themselves against the perfect process,” KASAH director Stuart Hardie said.

Although development panels have repetitive tasks within the process, the management of activities is very complicated.

Ultimate Mining has developed a Windows-based application that provides the necessary tools to effectively manage all activities in both the development panels and longwall panels. According to Ultimate Mining directors Matt Ryan and Petros Khalesirad, “Ultimine is the software solution for modern longwall mines’ development sustainability. Knowing process improvement specialists like Stuart Hardie understand the benefits and performance results gained from the software gives the whole system credibility.”

Ultimine has been trialled at a mine in central Queensland and is now commercially available, with expressions of interest from mines in NSW. It uses the latest programming tools such as the Microsoft .NET 2.0 framework with a SQL database.

The approach is based upon the premise all mining activities are cyclical and are meterage driven, making it applicable to all mining sectors.

In development the approach is typically applied to an entire gateroad length with each pillar treated as a repeated set of cyclic activities. Every activity has pre-determined trigger points and drives consistency in the mining approach. There would be in excess of 170 tasks, which include advancing services, supplying the continuous miner, preparation work for the panel extension and statutory inspections.

The mapped activities take into account all factors that can impinge on mining such as differing geological conditions, water management, requirements for inspections, crib breaks and more.

With this “map” in place it is then possible to reconcile against actual performance.

“The aim is to cut coal and at the same time perform as many ancillary tasks as you can so that when you go to advance the panel you don’t lose potential gains made during mining,” Hardie said. The next step in designing the system is to reconcile the available resources with the production needs – how many workers are needed to perform a set number of tasks on a given shift, for example.

“It’s about measuring the whole process down to the man-hour’s efficiency and exposing deficiencies.”

From an operational management point of view the approach has some very significant benefits because it provides an overall operational planning tool for deputies or under-managers.

It clearly allocates a control span to each functional role: a miner driver’s control span would be around an hour; a deputy’s control span is the shift; the production coordinator’s is a week to three months.

“In practice, however, coordinators are writing to-do lists on a shift-by-shift basis, and they get bogged down in detail. He’s so busy writing notes he’s not looking at process improvements. Ultimine provides the simple planning tool that frees up the coordinator to focus on improvements and planning forward,” Hardie said.

The system aims to ensure higher management levels have the ability to monitor performance but not intervene at shift level, unless imperative.

If performance is not in line with expectations, the system triggers dashboard reporting to the coordinator. As the production variance gets more out of whack the “dashboard report” gets triggered at a higher level of the management tree.

The approach also allows more accurate scrutiny of what is actually occurring on shifts and where delays may originate. For example, when mining occurs more quickly than predicated this places pressure on all of the required ancillary services which also need to take place within a reduced timeframe, possibly causing time lags to build up within the overall process. So a shift that appears to perform above budget may actually leave behind incomplete services installations which have to be picked up by the next shift.

During his 12 years of implementing process improvements, Hardie said he had never seen a software package so powerful to implement change. With a management operating system in place the focus then should shift to what actually causes mining delays.

Ultimine allows analysis of the issues and, as Hardie said, “If a deputy knows his control span, what expectations are required from him, then he makes it happen.”

Hardie said that each mine was unique and each process map must be developed with a cross-section of the mine’s workforce, with the final “perfect process” being agreed upon by all crews.