Home > Blogs > Mine Management in Real-Time through Integrated Remote Operations Centres

With upwards of 100,000 flights taking off and landing every day around the globe, it’s no wonder that the nerve centre of the airport is the Air Traffic Control Tower.  If anyone needs to know anything about what flight will be taking off, or landing, and when, the place to go for information is the Air Traffic Control Tower.

 

Decades ago, with the advent of Fleet Management Systems, the Dispatch Tower became the same for the surface mining industry.  Daily operations meetings, short-term planning meetings, even mine tours for visitors capitalised on the location, the infrastructure and, most importantly, the view from the Dispatch Tower.  If anyone needs to know anything about what’s happening in the mine, the place to go for information was – still is – the Dispatch Tower.  With communications technology improving, underground mines followed suit – learning from both their surface counterparts and the processing plants nearby – to capture the same benefit from control rooms for underground operations.

 

Fast forward to today and the industry – both on surface and underground – is bombarded with an excess of big data, emanating from an expanse of instruments and systems.  The control room of yesterday is no longer able to keep up with the burden of being all-knowing.  Control Room Operators are expected to keep track of everything from rock movement, seismicity, slope stability, air quality, vehicle health, operator fatigue – all in addition to their main task of ensuring safe and efficient production from the mine.

 

With great power comes great responsibility and our friends in the Dispatch Tower are now responsible for everything…  

 

Making the digital age of mining successful requires a new way of approaching the control room.  Many mining companies have adopted Integrated Remote Operations Centres to consolidate experts in one location.  These centres cost a fortune to create – and operate – and in many instances still don’t solve the problem… at least, not all on their own.  

 

To support the industry in realising the true potential of its real-time technology, Ramjack Technology Solutions has created rROC – a real-time Remote Operations Centre – designed to tackle the burden of expert system operations to enhance the performance of real-time systems on-site.  

 

Want to introduce a reliability-centred maintenance programme at your mine?  Want to achieve a challenging Overall Equipment Efficiency improvement target in a short period of time?  Want to monitor your global tailings storage facilities from a single location?  rROC is the way to get it done – efficiently, sustainably, and affordably.

 

Every rROC programme includes:

  • A scoping workshop used to define the desired outcomes of the programme;
  • A Programme Charter documenting the responsibilities, stages and milestones;
  • A Communication Protocol defining the communication flow for the programme;
  • A formal Knowledge Transfer Program that goes far beyond on-the-job training;
  • 24/7 monitoring of real-time systems from RAMJACK’s rROC facility in Johannesburg.

 

If you would like to see more value from the use of real-time systems at your mine, please contact your nearest Ramjack office to ask for a presentation on how rROC can help.