Improving your Mining Fleet Management with Enterprise Asset Management (EAM)

An essential part of all mining operations is your mobile fleet. The trucks that take your raw extracted material to the processing plant must be well-managed and maintained to carry a regular full payload in a timely, fuel-efficient manner.

Introducing strong Fleet Management practices will have a very positive impact on the smooth running of your operations.  A best-of-breed Asset Management System like Infor EAM will include Fleet Management functionality to record data pertaining to the health of your fleet and use that data to make insights and guide actions for your fleet’s maintenance and cost-effectiveness (with cost-per-mile savings.)

Consequences of Poor Fleet Management: 

• Increased journey times 
• Hold-ups in processing due to reduced deliveries of extracted raw materials 
• Unnecessary capex on new fleet due to long periods of downtime or asset failure  
• Increased fuel cost-per-mile 
• Accidents/Breakdowns / Safety risks for truck operators 
• Long repair times and critical assets out of action 
• Mis-management of inventory / spare parts  
• No accurate record of equipment maintenance costs, depreciation or downtime

Introducing Infor EAM’s Fleet Management Functionality  

Data collection 
Infor EAM takes feeds from IoT sensors and on-board computers on your fleets, to enable you to better track the health and performance of your fleet by collecting data such as: 

• Fuel consumption 
• Temperatures 
• Tyre wear and tear and pressure  
• Engine condition (oil and water pressure and temperatures) 
• Payload 
• Cost-per-mile 
   

All this data can be entered into your EAM as KPI’s that you can view from a single dashboard. From the dashboard, you can see, at a glance, which asset in your fleet is underperforming. You can break this data down by site or geographical location. From this raw data, you can create reports and generate work orders (WO) and also analyse your cost-per-mile.  

 
A West African mining client of Infor EAM uses the Fleet Management module on a daily basis. The fuel management component is of particular benefit. The KPI dashboard will highlight discrepancies between fuel purchased and fuel issued, which need to be acted upon by the supervisors. The dashboard will also alert the fleet management team to upward trends in fuel consumption, and this may be an indicator that proactive maintenance is necessary to remedy, for example, a fuel leak or engines with increased fuel consumption. Because Fleet Management sits within the Infor EAM system, inspection requests can then be raised in Infor EAM and, where necessary, work orders planned in so that an asset can be returned to service as quickly as possible. Ultimately this proactive maintenance strategy will help to ensure that MTTR and MTTB are minimised.   

Asset Identification 
Infor EAM includes a fleet management module, designed specifically to manage your mobile plant. This module can itemise trucks as a piece of fleet, distinct from fixed plant assets. This enables you to assess performance and manage work with variables unique to Fleet Management. This module enables you to store key information about your vehicle assets, including warranties, purchase orders and a bill of materials.   

Maintenance Planning 
Data stored in your EAM can be used to generate Work Orders in Infor EAM based on a combination of preventative, corrective and conditional maintenance plans. Against a repair WO, you can assign jobs, issue parts (more on this later) and update meter readings all from one screen. 

The Infor Fleet Management Module supports standardised maintenance codifications like VMRS.  It also enables you to schedule maintenance down to the hour, so that no time is wasted in returning mission-critical assets back into service. Once a WO starts, you can track the estimated cost vs actual cost of repair and the remaining balance - all recorded against that particular WO and the specific asset.  

You can also keep track of the downtime for the asset – and if the vehicle is out of action for a long time, you can analyse the reason, e.g. whether there’s a parts problem (wrong parts, long lead time) or technician training issue. 

Service Scheduling 
Your EAM can make recommendations on servicing based on rules you set up (i.e. setting a fuel consumption limit alert) or schedule regular servicing (i.e. every three months). You can set alerts to remind you of when your assets need inspecting/servicing and assign Technicians to those WO’s. 

Repairable spares inventory 
Infor EAM has an inventory management module which works with fleet management to keep track of purchase and use of your repairable spares and parts. From EAM, you can create purchase orders for parts and then keep a record of how many are in your inventory (and where) and how often these parts are requested and used. These can support your re-ordering strategies (using MRP functionality within Infor EAM), and each part can be added to the record of an individual asset. You can use data about the frequency and cost of purchasing spares to decide whether it is cost-effective to repair the asset. 

Contact us to receive a free consultation regarding your next EAM software system!

Source: Progressive TSL