Turning a “dumb” asset into a smart asset to elevate a site’s safety and profit
As with any project, even the smallest of elements are crucial to the success of said project. When it comes to the mining industry, lighting towers are utilised to light up a site. Without them, production and operations would have to cease. On the flip side, keeping lighting towers in operation throughout a project allows the night shift to continue the work needed to be executed, keeping all projects on track and in check.
On a typical mining site, you’ll find 10 to 50 lighting towers operating at one time. Imagine if even just one of those lighting towers were to stop working. What impact might that have on a project, let alone the safety of the staff? To prevent this from happening, what resources are needed to be put into place to ensure that lighting towers are fully functioning at all times? Time, money and effort are being poured into these assets to ensure production goes uninterrupted.
What if there were a more streamlined solution? Let’s dive in.
What Was The Problem?
Lighting towers present a few challenges for different members of the mining team. From operations managers to maintenance managers many workers rely on them. So they need to be fuelled, maintained, and positioned in the correct location before it gets dark so production isn’t interrupted.
Fuelled: The manual labour in ensuring that lighting towers are fuelled normally requires two workers to inspect the asset and then refill when required. There are times on visual inspection that the tower does not require refilling, however until now there was no way to be alerted of this, thus a human resource’s time has been wasted in doing this action. This resource could have been used to assist the project’s production in a way that only a human could. Additionally, the efforts to transport Diesel are accompanied by negative safety, space, and cost impacts.
Maintenance: Like any asset, it will require maintenance from time to time. Similarly to the fuelling process, a maintenance worker will conduct a physical check on the lighting towers
hour metre, record this manually then pull it to the workshop or conduct the maintenance in place once it falls due, as little to no planning can be done.
Location: Moving a lighting tower is as simple as hitching it and pulling it to wherever it may be needed at any given time. This might occur due to changes in short-term planning, vehicle breakdown or any number of emergencies, however each time it does occur, production is likely to be impacted, particularly if the tower isn’t returned to where it should be after it was borrowed during the night shift. The next afternoon a worker will need to drive around to find the tower and then return it to its productive location.
These three challenges in isolation would be an inconvenience and when they are across a fleet of 10, 20 or 30 light towers, this very quickly amounts to a full-time job. A job that could be replaced by a system that could assist in automating this process and relieving some of your resources.
What Was The Solution?
The opportunity was simple, turning what was otherwise known as a “dumb” asset that had one function, yet required copious resources to keep it operational and instead turning into a “smart” asset that is connected to a system. A dashboard that can be used to monitor all of their lighting towers from a central system. Having all of the data flow into one port or location allowed management to make the right decisions and only send out personnel to maintain or fuel the tower when it was necessary.
What Were The Outcomes?
Having a live feed of fuel onboard meant that there was no longer a need to check the fuel level to make sure the team would get through a production shift. This improves the safety of personnel, but it also means that better planning can occur around fuel management.
The dashboard allows the possibility of sharing the data with a contractor and outsourcing the fuelling of the towers completely, better managing cost and risk, whilst reducing expensive onsite labour.
Running hours became available through the live feed removing the need to visually check manually. Similarly reducing expensive onsite labour, but also allowing better scheduling of maintenance to coincide with shutdowns.
Depending on the onboard data available the client may also be able to predict and avoid breakdowns through responsive maintenance based on live data alerts also known as condition-based monitoring.
Knowing the exact location of a lighting tower makes their management far simpler. It allows dynamic responses to breakdowns or emergencies so that light can be located and made available with minimal interruption to production, in addition to reducing site labour driving around trying to find and then move the towers.
Beyond solving the challenges in the current processes with light towers we can also change the way we interact with them entirely. Remote start up and shut down means that we can dramatically reduce the number of personnel that need to be trained on the start up and shut down procedures. It also means we don’t have to have personnel driving in the dark at higher risk to start up a tower to light the area. Doing this remotely reduces any safety risk.
In the past the cost of making such assets “smart” has been too high but as hardware and software costs improve, scenarios like the one above are now a viable option. Miners are realising this and taking advantage of the labour savings.
For a fleet of 20 light towers the saving described above would mean the reduction of a FTE or potentially moving them to more productive tasks. With an average site worker costing around $168,000 that’s a big saving and doing that at the same time as improving safety and increasing production makes for a very strong argument to make a lighting tower fleet “smart”. Our client’s sure thought so.
Whether you’re operating a fleet of lighting towers or another “dumb” asset that you can now see the potential of automating its maintenance and streamlining its systems Single Source Solutions can work with you to create the dashboard, reporting and notification system that will help you and your team become more responsive and in turn make those crucial assets more profitable and become less of a hindrance to your production.
See how our Single Source team can help you automate and streamline your business to achieve growth this year!