The tools and strategies needed to run a successful mining operation have changed dramatically from just five or 10 years ago. Mining has always been a complex industry, featuring remote sites and challenging environmental operations that make it difficult to keep equipment running at its best. However, for decades, many organisations were able to rely upon deep benches of trained personnel at their sites to monitor and maintain the most critical assets, and to keep an eye on the essential ones.
Today, that landscape looks very different. In the last few years, experienced mining personnel have been retiring in droves, taking their decades of institutional knowledge with them. Unlike in decades past, experienced replacements have become difficult, if not impossible, to find – particularly for mines operating in remote locations. Gone are the days where a reliability team could count on having people on site who could tell if a conveyor or shovel was malfunctioning based on the sound of its operation.
At best, new staff onsite need lots of extra decision support to help them identify, isolate, and solve problems. At worst, there are no new people onsite, and the reliability team loses more visibility into the health of its assets with each passing day (see Figure 1).
Fortunately, modern technology can help reliability teams close the experience gap and ensure constant visibility into the health of assets, both on-site and across the enterprise. Modern sensors and machinery health software are more intuitive, affordable, and scalable than they have ever been, providing teams with an easy path to continuously monitor asset health, and intervene before small asset problems evolve into costly downtime. Today’s forward-thinking organisations are implementing these continuous condition monitoring technologies as part of a boundless automation vision to capture data from a more intelligent field, and then easily turn it into valuable, actionable information at the edge and in the cloud.
This is a preview of an article that was originally published in the March 2025 issue of Global Mining Review.
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