Lean Mining
“Efficiency through employee empowerment”
Lean is not about losing weight or trimming the fat from your organisation. Lean is about “working smarter not harder”; to reduce or eliminate the non-value adding work your people are doing on a day to day basis in order to make your product at customer demand.
Lean principles can be applied to almost any environment - the mining industry is no exception. The guiding principles can be used to come up with ideas to save time, money and effort thus empowering your workforce to increase productivity, efficiency and morale. And this leads to more profit – “mining for profit”.
ElementCMC will work with clients to improve the operational efficiency and the culture of their organisation. We will work to establish strategic goals and visions, so that the path forward is clear for all personnel to see.
“Vision without action is a daydream; Action without vision is a nightmare” - Japanese proverb.
We will facilitate the mapping of your product streams to highlight areas for improvement. We will guide the business improvement ideas and initiatives that this process generates through classic Lean Methodologies, such as:
Six Sigma
Whilst not strictly a Lean tool, Six Sigma works well when used in conjunction with Lean. Six Sigma is used to improve quality. We use the DMAIC methodology to get to the root of the problem, come up with a way to improve the situation and implement controls to stop the impact. Lean tools can be used to control variation.
5S – the keystone in the foundations of Lean
5S is more than just housekeeping. It is about being able to gain immediate access to the equipment you need, when you need it, and making sure it is ready to use. It also provides the framework to sustain the changes made and empowers the workforce to make incremental and continuous improvements.
Visual Factory & Visual Management
As humans, we are inherently designed to take visual cues from our surroundings; this is why our eyes are in the front of our heads! Why don’t we set up our workplace so it is intuitive, thereby not having to ask questions about why something is the way it is. We should be able to see when there is something abnormal, immediately.
We can deploy the benefits of doing a job in a “best practice” way by reducing the human movement in the task and showing easier and faster ways to complete a step. By timing each step, the value added and non value added times are revealed. This way we can train everyone the same way and the job can be done in a known, repeatable time.
We can assist gathering data to show Overall Equipment Effectiveness, and setup planned maintenance regimes. We can train personnel in autonomous maintenance techniques, operators doing minor maintenance tasks like oil levels and drive belt tension checks. It gets operations and maintenance teams working together, freeing up the tradesmen for higher priority tasks.
Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE) is determining the capacity of the machine taking into account all of the three critical dependent factors. Availability x Utilisation x Quality = OEE.
Why shut a machine down to repair or change the configuration unless all the required equipment is there prior to turning the power off? QCO will assist in changing the way we think in terms of minimising the time a machine is turned off and hence, not producing and making money. We use Shingo’s 5 step methodology to allow smooth changeovers and then deploy the learning’s across the facility.
Intuitive design so that errors are simply and easily identified and can be eliminated. An example of this is an item that fits only one way - a power outlet and 240 Volt plug, the plug will only go in one way. Keyways, chamfers and dowels in machinery are other examples.
Introduce a discipline of only making an item when the last finished item has been taken. “Take one, Make one”. It is a better way to work by making the work flow and reducing the work in process (WIP). The idea is to save time by working only when it is needed, to clean and improve the work area and thereby improving the quality of the product.