Case Study: Increasing 24/7 Coal Mine Production
Industry: Mining
Client: Twentymile Coal Company's
mine near
Oak Creek is the most productive mine in
Colorado and one of the largest and most productive underground mines in
America. The mine employs approximately 500 workers and shipped 8.8 million tons of steam coal to customers in the
Midwest and Southwest.
Twentymile Mine joined the
Peabody family of companies in the spring of 2004.
Challenge: Twentymile Mine wanted to expand its production by nearly 40 percent, growing the operations to ship up to 12 million tons of high-Btu, low sulfur coal annually by 2008. Despite investing capital in a new, state-of-the-art longwall mining system and a new washplant in order to produce higher quality coal, the expected production needs were still well short of targeted levels.
Solution: CIRCADIAN’s solution was to expand the mining operations to 24/7 continuous production and to redeploy the workforce. Through strategic planning with Circadian, an improved production schedule was developed to maximize human asset utilization by deploying the mine’s manpower more efficiently.
This required a significant change to the existing employee schedules, including a restructuring of the work teams and their job functions.
The previous schedule had isolated individual crews for production, and other crews for maintenance and preparation.tasks.
This led to times when there was no production because the crews scheduled for work were not qualified for the task.
In some cases, production would remain idle for upwards of 24 hours due to this constraint.
There was also unscheduled down time of the longwall “miner” for repairs for the same reason.
By balancing skill levels and job functions, as well as increasing cross training, enabled the mine to produce coal at any time of day, rather than have to wait until a production crew was scheduled to work.
Further, separate maintenance crews were always available for a regularly scheduled maintenance window, which was planned for each day, during which time the production crews caught up on “housekeeping” and preparation tasks.
As part of the schedule development, Circadian worked with the employees to identify the ideal way to staff the production schedule to support the needed 24/7 production goal.
This process allowed employees to have control over the overall schedule that would fit best within the operational needs but at the same time include their preferences for the overall shift schedule.
Through educational sessions, employee surveys and focus teams, all of the employees were given the opportunity to participate and ultimately select the one schedule that would meet the majority of employee family, social and work needs.
Results: After working with CIRCADIAN, the mine achieved:
- The targeted 40% increase in production.
- Full employee buy-in to the work schedule and improved employee morale.
Next Steps: