It might be a relativity new company, but Decoda is already making a name in the mining industry through its load-and-haul solutions.
Officially launched in July this year, Decoda is a company that has gone from strength to strength in its short life.
Originally a part of Hastings Deering, Decoda was created after the company looked into how it could help its customers improve the performance of their assets through digital technology.
With many miners struggling to improve equipment performance despite having digital initiatives in place, Decoda quickly realised there was a significant gap between most digital initiatives and their operational execution – and that gap is a key contributor to the estimated $350 billion dollars in lost value mining companies are leaving in the ground every year.
“With operational costs rapidly increasing due to inflation, rising wages, poorer ore quality, and availability, this lost value is only going to continue to increase,” Decoda executive general manager George Spink told Australian Mining.
“This is why it is imperative that mining operations begin to extract real value from the data they are collecting and turn that data into actionable insights that can drive performance improvement across their load and haul circuits.”
Now a leading provider of data and analytics solutions, Decoda works with customers to help them achieve their mine plans through running more efficient and productive operations.
A key tenet of Decoda’s methodology involves adopting a ‘closed loop’ system approach, designed to bridge performance gaps and achieve targets in line with the mine plan.
“Load-and-haul is a key ‘link’ in the mining value chain in terms of either removing overburden or moving the actual commodity itself down the value chain towards processing,” Spink said.
The fact load-and-haul moves the commodity along the value chain makes it an invaluable piece of the puzzle for all mines.
Decoda currently has three key solutions to enable its customers to meet their mine plans: operate for productivity (O4P), operate for reliability (O4R), and short interval control (SIC).
The company can use O4P to provide analytics as a service to a customer. This involves analysing the load-and-haul data and identifying areas for improvement, while providing ongoing monitoring to assist in providing a cycle of continuous improvement.
“On the other hand, O4R involves us still providing analytics as a service, but with a specific focus on understanding operator-induced events that could impact machine performance or reliability ultimately impacting production,” Spink said.
Decoda’s O4R service offering helps customers in two ways: the first is that it can provide valuable coaching insights to operators to minimise the impact on a machine’s performance, productivity, safety and, potentially, costs; the second is providing operator feedback and coaching on better machine operation that can help with retaining inexperienced operators.
SIC, the third service that Decoda currently provides, is aligned to its O4P service offering and is a forward-looking decision-support tool.
“Unplanned events happen during a shift. This tool, drawing on near real-time data, allows the production supervisor to run scenario options intra-shift and select the best scenario in terms of hauling and loading unit allocation.” Spink said.
“This ensures production performance remains on track to achieving shift production targets.”
The company has initially focused its efforts on the load-and-haul vertical of the mining chain, as this part of the process is essentially in its DNA.
“Given our evolution from the Hastings Deering Caterpillar dealership, our original focus was using data and analytics to help customers increase productivity from their mining machines,” Spink explained.
“Load-and-haul machinery are key equipment items sold by the dealership, hence this is our heritage.”
Decoda understands that several factors can cause variability in the load-and-haul circuit and is putting that understanding to use to identify insights that help customers continually improve the performance of their load and haul fleets.
“Decoda’s approach also includes ‘looking left and right’ of load-and-haul in the value chain,” Spink said.
“For example, fragmentation from a blast may be impacting the ability for the digging and loading tools to handle the material and this may impact the performance of the load and haul vertical.”
Decoda has found that its customers have been surprised at what their data tells them, which further underpins the company’s drive to provide services to its customers.
“Typically, customers have preconceived ideas as to the performance of their load-and-haul vertical, including machine performance,” Spink said.
“Often these preconceived ideas are based on observation or ‘gut feel’ and may not be based on factual data.
“When operational data is extracted and presented in a way that shows how the load-and-haul circuit is working as a system, there is often surprise at the observations.”
While mine operators may find it challenging to see Decoda’s findings, Spink said it was always nice to see the drive and desire to start implementing improvement initiatives.
“Systems thinking is a key approach for Decoda,” he said.
“To successfully close any gap between actual and plan is to treat the load-and-haul vertical as a system and understand the relationship between the loading tool and the haul trucks as a whole and not separate them into individual parts.”
This feature appeared in the October issue of Australian Mining.