Mining Reliability and Asset Management
Mining Reliability and Asset Management, from the Pit Face to the Process Plant
Mining operations run on the orchestration of fleets, fixed plants, and people across one of the most demanding operating environments any industry maintains. The Mantua Group delivers reliability engineering, asset management, and shutdown discipline for open-pit and underground operations across the global commodity mix: coal, copper, zinc, lead, gold, silver, titanium, diamonds, and rare earth metals. We work with the ICMM critical-control framework that BHP, Rio Tinto, Boliden, and the wider responsible-operator community have adopted as their working safety doctrine, and we translate that framework into the maintenance, turnaround, and EAM-driven workflows that production actually depends on.
Open-pit and underground: one mining industry, two distinct reliability problems
The orchestration problem is the same on the surface and below it. The constraints are not. TMG works in both, and the methods we apply differ in the ways the operating environments differ.
Open-pit operations run on the orchestration of very large mobile fleets. Two-hundred-tonne haul trucks, rope and hydraulic shovels, motor graders, water carts, and dozers operate continuously, twenty-four hours a day, against a mine plan that is itself updated daily. Each unit of equipment carries a heavy capital charge, and every hour out of service is an hour of foregone production. The reliability problem is the orchestration problem: maintaining the availability of a fleet whose individual elements wear out at different rates, whose service intervals are denominated in operating hours, and whose unscheduled downtime cascades into the entire mining cycle.
- Mobile-equipment-dominated maintenance load
- Operating-hours-based PM scheduling
- 24/7 production cycle with limited maintenance windows
- Tyre lifecycle as a major cost and supply-chain factor
- Light-vehicle and pedestrian interaction zones
- Wet-weather, dust, and seasonal shutdown exposure
Underground operations compress the same orchestration problem into a confined and ventilated environment in which the constraints multiply. Loaders, jumbos, trucks, and personnel-transport vehicles share narrow drives. Ventilation, ground support, gas monitoring, and emergency egress define the operating envelope. Mobile equipment is often diesel-electric or, increasingly, battery-electric to reduce ventilation load and improve the underground environment. The reliability problem couples to the safety case directly: an unavailable jumbo or loader does not merely slow production, it can compromise the development sequence on which the whole working face depends.
- Battery-electric and trolley-electric fleet adoption
- Real-time positioning and collision-avoidance integration
- Ventilation and gas-monitoring critical controls
- Ground-support and rock-fall risk management
- Confined-space maintenance and rescue planning
- Shift-change and refuge-chamber emergency response
From energy minerals to electrification metals to the rare earth supply chain
The reliability problem is the reliability problem regardless of what the orebody produces, but the regulatory environment, the process route, the customer base, and the price of unscheduled downtime differ commodity by commodity. TMG works across the full mining commodity mix.
Mobile equipment runs on operating hours. Fixed plant runs on the calendar.
The single most consequential design decision in a mining EAM is the maintenance-trigger logic, and the single most common cause of preventive-maintenance breakdown is treating mobile equipment and fixed plant on the same trigger. They are not the same problem. Mobile equipment ages with use. Fixed plant ages with time. The trigger logic, the data flow, the compliance test, and the planning rhythm differ accordingly.
Hours-Based Maintenance
The wear that drives mobile-equipment maintenance is dominantly mileage- and load-cycle-driven. A 250-tonne haul truck idle for a week has aged less than a 250-tonne haul truck that has run two hundred operating hours over the same period. The PM cycle is denominated in operating hours and triggered against an accumulating SMU (service-meter-unit) reading reported daily by the equipment fleet-management system into the EAM.
Calendar-Based Maintenance
The wear that drives fixed-plant maintenance is dominantly time-driven for reasons that have nothing to do with how hard the unit is running. Lubricant degrades on the calendar. Insulation ages on the calendar. Atmospheric corrosion advances on the calendar. Refractory consumes on the calendar. The PM cycle is denominated in days, weeks, months, and years, and the trigger is the calendar date.
Work instructions tailored to your equipment, your standards, and your operating envelope
The OEM service manual specifies what to do at each maintenance interval. It does not specify how it is done at this site, on this equipment configuration, with the parts and tools your stores actually carries, under the safe-work procedures your operation requires. The gap between the manual and the working instruction is the gap that turns precision-planned maintenance into ad-hoc execution.
Site-specific procedure development
TMG develops the working procedure that bridges OEM specification, your site's safety standards, your isolations, and your equipment configuration. The procedure references specific tools by manufacturer and model, specific parts by stores number, specific torque values, specific acceptance criteria, and the photographic record points the audit trail requires.
Bowtie-aligned task hazard analysis
Each work instruction carries the task hazard analysis that the ICMM critical-control framework requires. Material unwanted events relevant to the task are identified; preventive and mitigative controls referenced; verification points embedded in the procedure. The TARP linkage is the work instruction.
Variant management for fleet equipment
One haul-truck procedure, multiple equipment-class variants. The variant management approach makes a procedure for the 793F a controlled configuration of the procedure for the 797F, not a fresh round of authoring. AIAG / VDA harmonisation principles applied to mining mobile equipment.
Continuous improvement loop
The procedure is revised through use. The auditor with a stopwatch tracks the technician through the work; the departures from the plan become the next revision. The procedure converges on the work; the work converges on the procedure; the variability between technicians and shifts contracts to the residual the work itself imposes.
What sites that have implemented these disciplines in earnest report
The figures below are the gains realised by mining operations that have implemented hours-based EAM discipline, calendar-based fixed-plant PM, six-phase shutdown planning, and complete kitting at depth. The realisation in any given engagement depends on the operating discipline that sustains the implementation. That sustaining discipline is the work TMG is engaged for.
Engage TMG for your mining reliability programme
The Mantua Group implements hours-based mobile-equipment EAM regimes, calendar-based fixed-plant PM, six-phase shutdown planning, complete kitting, contractor management, and custom work instructions for mining operations across the global commodity mix. We bring the analytical rigour, the regulatory familiarity, and the implementation discipline that turns a software platform into a working maintenance system.