This sizeable exporter of “A Grade” black granite dimension stone was experiencing a significant increase in demand for its products.
Previous mine planning methods had inhibited the quarry’s ability to increase its production by way of utilizing additional teams even as operations were already running 24/7.
New customer orders were being short supplied – often due to block rejects, many of which could have been identified insitu. Accuracy and depth of drilling was inconsistent.
The skills of the supervisors on site were very poor. There were too few supervisor roles and supervisors spent more than 85% of their time on nonsupervisory functions. Many man hours were wasted on managing customer service complaints and coordination of off-loading and reloading of trucks.
Sales forecasts and planning schedules to meet production demand did not existed. Weekly planning was undertaken by the mine manager and was mainly focused on where to mine for best quality granite grade. No reviews of comparison of actual production to weekly plans were performed.
Frustration among the sales, aftersales, and customer ccservice teams had been growing many were on the verge of quitting. More than 85% of incoming sales related calls were to complain about trucking delays or to schedule returns and replacement blocks.
Senior management was predominantly focused on off-site (more than 180 km away) activities at the new finishing facility which was already experiencing start-up challenges.
One major customer was threatening to cancel orders and buy elsewhere.
A major restructuring effort for the organization was undertaken. Additional supervisory roles were created including:
Sales orders were loaded into a basic master schedule and production requirements were properly balanced to crews. Areas where production demand exceeded capacity were flagged and customer service adopted a new practice of proactively calling customers to reschedule collections. Export activities were moved up the priority ladder.
Nonsupervisory tasks were removed from the daily responsibilities of field supervisors, allowing them to focus on pre-grading and drilling accuracy.
New simple drill depth measurement tools were introduced which improved depth accuracy by 40% in less than three weeks.
Pre-screening and post extraction, pre-loading screening of blocks reduced the number of reloaded blocks by 58%.
Reduced re-work eliminated the need for any additional crew members.
Production reporting against schedule was introduced. Throughput increased and sales volume increased by 24%.
