3546 Improving spatial mine-to-plan compliance at an open pit mine through enhanced short-term mine planning
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17159/Abstract
The value realised by an open pit mine depends on the quality and integrity of the mine planning process as well as the level of execution against these mine plans. When managing the execution against the mine plan, how well the mine plan is executed spatially, is of critical importance. The short-term mine plan is the plan that is physically executed on most open pit mines while the spatial mine-to-plan compliance is typically reconciled against the annual business plan. Short-term mine planning therefore plays an important role in the effectiveness of the spatial mine-to-plan compliance reconciliation process.
The Sishen iron ore mine enhanced the role that short-term mine planning plays in enabling the forward - looking component of the spatial mine-to-plan compliance reconciliation process. The enhanced short-term mine planning process focuses on Detailed Tactical Sequence designs per mining pushback, the health of value chain buffers, spatial plan-to-plan reconciliation and the associated management routines.
This led to an improvement in the spatial mine-to-plan compliance to the business plan from 71% to 94% over the four-year period from 2020 to 2023 inclusive. These results indicate that the application of short-term mine planning as part of an integrated spatial mine-to-plan compliance process at open pit mines can contribute positively to improving the level of spatial execution against the business plan. This paper presents the enhancement made to the short-term mine planning process, which can be considered by other open pit mining operations to improve spatial mine-to-plan compliance.
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