Mining Industry

Delving Into Shutdown Operations

One out of every three shutdown events in the mining industry faces significant cost growth and schedule slip. Throughout its history, the mining industry has consistently failed to recognize that shutdowns are unique and complex events that significantly impact an organization’s bottom line. More recently, mining industry shutdown events have increased in size and complexity, growing the struggle to keep them within their planned targets.

The mining industry is beginning to understand the value of utilizing structured work processes. Without these roadmaps, important preparation tasks for shutdowns are often missed or completed too late to ensure safe and reliable shutdown execution. Even when structured work processes exist, they are typically take a “one-size-fits-all” approach for low complexity routine events and high complexity sporadic events. 

Shutdowns today require more site-wide engagement, significantly more than day-to-day maintenance operations. They also need to offer flexibility, more so than the stage-gated approach sometimes borrowed from capital projects. 

For more than two decades, AP-Networks has partnered with heavy industry to deliver top-tier shutdown event results. It starts with our database. AP-Networks has developed the world’s most robust dataset of shutdown performance indicators. By pairing this information with our Industry-leading tools, we help mining operations establish a new paradigm for success.

Our unmatched database allows us to perform comparative benchmarking assessments for mining operations. We can establish an objective perspective of current event performance relative to predictability and competitiveness metrics using established shutdown KPIs. Additionally, we identify key gaps that need to be addressed and best practices to implement to drive success. 

Our expertise in developing and customizing work processes has helped mining organizations improve outcomes through sustainable, repeatable best practices. A well-built work process is only successful when paired with consistent adherence through proper management and accountability. NaviTrack is our cloud-based, industry-leading tool that makes it possible. With NaviTrack, each team member is responsible for their activities, and in-platform status reporting helps management identify problems before they lead to negative outcomes.

Our powerful database, ever-evolving solutions like NaviTrack, and associates’ expertise have proven instrumental for our clients in the mining industry around the world as they pursue and achieve safe, predictable and competitive shutdowns.

Here’s the bottom line: if your organization wants to drive top-echelon performance of shutdown operations, no one has a better, more proven track record in the mining industry than AP-Networks.