One of DINGO’s largest customers is among the world’s top five producers of export metallurgical coal. Their Met Coal division alone produces approximately 30 million tonnes annually of saleable coal from its operations in Australia and Canada, which is then provided to steelmakers and power producers worldwide.

This customer operates a fleet of 150 haul trucks, 80 dozers, 30 loaders, 30 hydraulic excavators and shovels, several drills and 100 underground assets spread across their global mining operations. This company spends hundreds of millions of dollars each year to maintain its fleet.

The Challenge of Maintaining a Reliable Fleet Around the Globe

Before engaging DINGO, each mine was managing its maintenance program independently while using traditional sampling and time-based maintenance practices:

• Taking over 2,000 samples a month and sending them to four different labs
• Results provided in a variety of formats with recommendations based on lab limits, varying by labs
• The logistics of managing the data were extremely difficult and sharing of information was non-existent Other types of condition data were not readily available, so maintenance decisions were being made with incomplete information
• Site reliability engineers were responsible for analysis; however, they had insufficient time and tools to compile the right data and effectively perform this task

The company’s Head of Projects and Engineering identified this problem and challenged an internal leadership team comprised of the maintenance managers from each site to find a sustainable solution.

The Solution

One of their engineers had success with DINGO’s Asset Health system in a previous role and proposed to pilot a DINGO program at his site to evaluate its potential use across the company’s entire coal operation. DINGO implemented an Asset Wellness pilot program and rapidly demonstrated its capabilities and results-driven philosophy. The program used DINGO’s TRAKKA® software to optimize the asset performance of trucks, shovels, graders and other assets.

At the end of the pilot program, the site reported:

• Cost savings of over $250K, a 7:1 return
• Improved, more efficient maintenance practices
• Dramatic improvement in the component condition

Following the pilot’s success, DINGO partnered with the customer to create a centralized system that would deliver the benefits of the Asset Wellness network across all operations from an innovation incubator at the customer’s corporate office.

The advantages of this approach included:

• Maintenance is directed by remote, centralized experts, reducing site planning workload and increasing efficiency by applying key learnings across all sites
• Site reliability teams could now focus on defect elimination rather than data compilation & analysis
• DINGO provided the tools and expertise to create a centralized Asset Health system that tapped into the power of all available condition data to keep assets healthy and operations running smoothly. TRAKKA was used to measure and track all results

Component Condition During Pilot

The Results

As a result of the program, this customer can now focus on critical maintenance and operations activities because:

• They rely on the remote condition-based planning and work management provided by DINGO’s technology and experts, along with a centralized reliability team at the customer’s headquarters
• DINGO conducts routine reliability and maintenance team meetings on open issues until components return to normal operating conditions. Learnings are shared across teams and mine sites
• All repair and component change-out decisions are now based on condition vs. operating hours
• Cost savings are captured, tracked, and shared with all key stakeholders, building further momentum for the program

This DINGO customer achieved a payback from the program within three months and an ROI of 3:1 in the first year.

The program, now in its fifth year, has achieved:

• Operating cost reduction in excess of US$55 million
• Overall asset health has improved from 17% critical components in 2011 to now less than 1%
• Customer peace of mind, knowing their assets are managed by a highly accountable team of maintenance experts whose sole purpose is to improve the health and life of assets

DINGO’s exclusive global database of similar equipment, proprietary analytics leading to actionable insights, and ongoing results generated by the program has led to greater predictability, increased accuracy in budgeting and planning, improved asset health and life, and significant cost savings.

To find out how much you could save, visit our cost avoidance calculator.