When a coal miner in Mpumalanga Province, South Africa, experienced challenges with its critical mining equipment, they engaged Pragma. Using their On Key software, the Pragma team transformed the lifecycle component tracking. So far, the latest data indicates that this intervention has enhanced equipment reliability by 92 percent.
One of Pragma South Africa’s prominent clients is a significant player in the coal mining sector of Mpumalanga, operating as a contract mining company near Ogies. Their underground operations rely heavily on the performance and availability of critical mining equipment, including Continuous Miners (Komatsu Joy and Sandvik MC4xx machines), shuttle cars, roof-bolters, and feeder breakers. Ensuring the reliability of this machinery is paramount to achieving production targets and maintaining a safe working environment.
Key challenges
In the harsh and demanding environment of underground mining, the reliability of mobile and fixed equipment is critical. However, for the coal mining company, frequent component failures, unplanned stoppages, and limited visibility into component lifespans made it difficult to maintain production efficiency and control maintenance costs. This lack of visibility also hampered planning efforts and limited risk mitigation for assets and components.
Worsening matters, a significant portion of maintenance activities was reactive. Inevitably, this resulted in frequent unplanned breakdowns, production losses, and elevated repair costs.
Pragma’s intervention: On Key Software
The Pragma team addressed these challenges by leveraging the adaptability of On Key software and its Insights reports, relates Pragma’s Partner Consultant, Tim Beavon, outlining the critical steps followed. “We expanded the use of custom fields, and components were added under the asset tree with tracking information to support the creation of custom reports and dashboards. This significantly improved visibility into component performance.”
Then, with access to the critical data, Pragma’s Reliability Engineer was able to generate targeted reliability reports, identify equipment risks, and implement action plans to mitigate failures and enhance equipment reliability.
Detailed insights delivered
Afterwards, using On Key’s Life Cycle Component Tracking reports and dashboards, the team could monitor component performance across the fleet in real time. “The platform delivered detailed insights into usage hours, failure patterns, and historical replacements – enabling more proactive, data-driven decisions. As a result, the main piece of primary equipment, the Continuous Miner, achieved an average availability of 92% over the past year,” Beavon explains.
Enabling Impactful Decisions
Ultimately, Pragma’s intervention enabled the following impactful decisions:
• Data-driven component replacement: Maintenance intervals were optimised using actual wear-and-tear data, significantly reducing both premature replacements and unexpected failures.
• Improved equipment availability: The ability to track high-risk components enabled teams to schedule maintenance proactively, improving asset availability.
• Strategic lifecycle costing insights: Better insights into component lifecycle costing supported informed decisions on replacement and refurbishment strategies.
