Brrt..brrt… Mine Manager is calling. “Growy, I’m sending you the FS for the 2nd decline. It wasn’t approved by the IC – don’t know why. Can you take a look and let me know if you spot anything. Gotta go… we are being called back in”. Line goes dead. I’m looking at my phone wondering what the hell went wrong.
A 140 page .pdf arrives in the inbox; detailed design for a second underground decline that will allow a very congested 3km of 1:7 gradient haulage route to turn into a one way circuit with passing bays and cut throughs.
I opened the document and was confronted with a library of technical mining terms, concepts and calculations that my electrician turned BI Black Belt brain didn’t fully comprehend. It won’t be in the Geotech … that’ll be taken care of. The whole initiative is about truck speed. Ctrl+F “Speed”. “TKMpOH”. “Descend”. Then it stood out like the proverbial – the empty truck descends at 17.5kph. Yep, true… for about 500m then pulls into a stockpile waiting for three loads to ascend past. Then pops out and goes full tilt; hiding again before the next load.
Ref: Truck Haulage rates, Table 1x. Ok, let’s go there. And there it was, the OEM table depicting ascend & descend speeds, varying gradients per loaded or unloaded. I was familiar with that exact table from Haulage Improvement initiatives. Wow…. I’ve realised. We’ve referenced Google.
Called back the Mining Manager – normally pretty unflappable. Not today…
A quick disclaimer – there was some physical data collection activity; graduate in the dicky seat type observations. They might have pulled a couple of quiet shifts. They might have scored the waste backfill truck navigating routes away from the haulage highway. Not sure, but the reality of the situation was not reflected in the project context and the OEM Table was still driving decisions around speed.
Anyway, I got to work with the corporate technical people and the analysis was corrected. The Investment Committee approved on the second pass and what was a 10 year break even proposal turned into a 27 month payback period, and is still making bank as you read this.
It proved to me, Charles Kettering was correct. “A problem well defined is a problem half solved”. The converse of that is a problem poorly defined hampers our ability to find the right solution. For problem definition help, contact Damian Grow, Growth Improvements.