Mining and Metals

• 47% improvement in daily meters drilled
• 38% improvement in long-hole development
• 20% improvement in daily meters drilled per drill

USC had recently completed a successful project with the client involving their underground mobile maintenance fleets, with substantial results on improving equipment availability. That’s when they came to us with a different challenge at another of their mines. See what the challenges we experienced.

• 24% Improvement over baseline tonnes ore processed
• 40% Reduction in maintenance backlog
• 18% Increase in fleet productivity

The company, which operates a large open-pit mine site, approached USC Consulting Group with an interest in addressing three significant operational issues.

• 7% to 12% increased mill throughput
• 30% to 50% improved effective underground equipment utilization
• 10% to 15% increased mine productivity

The mine used the bench and fill method as their primary means to recover the ore. This yielded higher productivity per exploitation unit and lower exploitation costs by lowering the cut-off grade. Already considered one of the world’s lowest cost producers, the mine operators believed its effectiveness could be further improved.

• 22% production increase
• 13% attainment to budget improvement

The mine had experienced a 60,000-ton shortfall, averaging 85% attainment to plan over a two-year period. Although there was an operating system in place, the data collected needed to be converted into useful information to support better decision-making. The mine management, familiar with USC Consulting Group’s global mining and metals expertise, asked us to develop and fully implement a “closed loop” management operating system (MOS) within the long hole mining processes. The goal was to set realistic expectations for volume of work while capturing problems and delays that erode capacity.

• 23.5% mine cost-per-ton decrease
• 7.1% concentrate grade improvement
• 1.3% density control improvement
• 22% production in tons mined increase

The management team at a large, open-pit mine had already established improvement initiatives to achieve greater operational efficiency but weren’t seeing fast enough results. USC Consulting was called in to accelerate the process.

• 40% in-process slab inventory reduction
• 45% steelmaking backlog reduction
• 7% throughput increase
• $35 million total value of implemented improvements

The company had just emerged from bankruptcy. The new management wanted to take advantage of improving steel markets propelled by foreign demand. To succeed, the steel mill needed to revise its production strategy.

• 27% overall reduction in near misses
• 50% reduction in lost time incidents

After the manufacturer suffered a third fatality in 10 years at its Midwestern plant, it asked USC Consulting Group to help it develop a comprehensive and effective safety program. The plant, which employed 800 people, had a less-than-satisfactory safety record that earned it an OSHA rating near 11, which meant that for every 200,000 hours worked it would experience 11 lost-time injuries requiring a hospital visit and a work stoppage. By comparison, an OSHA rating near 0.2 incidents per 200,000 work hours is considered the gold standard for industrial safety and health.

• 139 Tons Average Daily Increase in Copper Smelted
• 27,000 Tons 11 Month Reduction in Reverts
• 25% Increase in Total Blister Copper Production

The client was experiencing production challenges. They were consistently missing their daily production target for blister copper. On a good day they could produce five charges of blister copper but six charges were always out of reach.

• 45,000 lb. Reduction in inventory in the first five months
• Projected to Achieve their 20% goal within the first year.

Processing tantalum from mined ore to powder or ingots takes an exceptional degree of organizational awareness and focus. Not only is tantalum refining a multifaceted process in and of itself, but as it moves along the supply chain, it often travels halfway across the world until it ends up in the customer’s hands. For our client, this means a globally decentralized inventory that it had to account for and leverage against other processing sites. As a result, the cycle time from extraction to final sale could take as long as 14 months, unduly expending significant amounts of resources over the entire timeline.