On Fleet

With Kal Tire's tyre operations management system (TOMS), mine operators have the opportunity to analyse real-time performance data and make decisions for their tyres and fleets. With up-to-date information, decisions for today’s shift and future shifts are readily integrated into work plans and schedules.

With TOMS, Kal Tire looks at making tyre management more of a proactive and predictive service, like much of the mobile equipment maintenance activities on any mine.

In addition to accessible and transparent KPI reporting and service agreement compliance, TOMS focuses on planning, predicting and pre-scribing maintenance rather than reporting on past activity.

The gradual introduction of TOMS across Kal Tire mine site operations marks the start of a shift in communication with its mining customers, delivering a story that is more relevant and tied to both fleet availability and operational productivity.

The benefits to miners are significant, and even in the day-to-day operations it means enabling real-time insight that allows technicians and miners to make informed decisions for the day.

For a company servicing more than 150 mine sites across five continents and with over 45 years of mining tyre management experience, the benefits of using TOMS and turning internal data capabilities into customer insight is also far-reaching. The system allows company personnel to collect and analyse tyre management data in a consistent manner across multiple locations and a variety of equipment types us-ing a common language. This allows teams to leverage that data to set and compare performance benchmarks and shift the focus from historical results to predictive maintenance and productivity planning.

With a standard language in place for everything from tyre descriptions to inspection findings, easy-to-use dashboard reporting and operational standards for inspections, rotations and more. Teams around the world can share the best practices and ensure tyre management and fleet operations are optimised for uptime and performance. Aggregated data from around the world benchmarks results for tyre performance, downtime, haul fleet productivity and more to identify opportunities to improve fleet use.

The number of daily tyre-related activities the company is involved with should enable insight and learning. Through ‘big data’ analytics, the company hopes to identify some of these areas that can add value to its customers and manufacturer partners.

TOMS launched in 2018, and is now in use on over 80 opencast and underground mines across 12 countries. These mine sites cover a wide variety of operating conditions geographically from northern Canada to south eastern Australia, via the Chilean Andes and tropical West Africa, as well as across a variety of commodities and opencast, quarry and underground mine types.

Three tools solving common challenges

From the wide range of data collected, it is possible to see that there are common challenges facing mining operations when it comes to mining tyres.

First, the majority of mining tyres are scrapped due to operational damage. Only one in four tyres survives long enough to be worn out. This means that on average, miners see the benefit of only two-thirds of the available life from their tyres. For a large opencast mine that might spend CAN$30 million a year on tyres, that is CAN$10 million of value lost due to operational tyre damage. 

Secondly, and as a direct result of the above, around 70% of all tyre work performed on a mine site is unplanned. This leads to a potentially significant increase in the amount of truck downtime as a result of much operational tyre damage being hard to plan.

These two primary challenges led the development teams to ask: What concrete steps can we take to improve the amount of planned tyre work in conditions where there is significant operational damage?

Bearing in mind that 20 - 25% of the work the tyre teams do on-site involves removing tyre assemblies to allow mechanics access to carry out maintenance work, the company also asked: what can be done to encourage planning that allows tyre work to take place concurrently while trucks are already down for maintenance work?

While future focus will see TOMS increasingly accommodate well-established maintenance concepts such as condition-based monitoring as a core tyre management tool, the system today includes three tools aimed at increasing overall awareness and communication between the tyre team on-site and the customers maintenance planning team.

To read the rest of this article, please download the full March/April issue from Global Mining Review here.

Read the article online at: https://www.globalminingreview.com/special-reports/21042020/on-fleet/