The cost of production from truck and loader fleets is influenced by management development of the culture of the organisation, work practices, systems and procedures of the production and maintenance teams. Establishing if the cost of production is the best that can be achieved then requires the measurement of results against established standards of performance. This paper provides a series of discussion points of the factors that influence the cost of production from men and machines for large scale open pit mining operation and provides some suggested performance standards in the form of Benchmarks. Most of the references have been drawn from established large scale deep pit mines in USA, Canada and Australia which have had to implement and constantly fine tune cost efficiencies in order to survive.
The discussion provides:
a review of priorities or the relative importance of the various cost elements for a mining system;
suggestions of systems and procedures for the operation and maintenance of machines which are considered to yield the best overall results;
examples of operations that have developed and implemented management systems and controls that are achieving good results in specific functions;
and suggested benchmarks of performance.