East Mining Company (EMCO), one of the major Russian exporters of brown coal, in cooperation with Zyfra, Finnish-Russian industrial digitalisation leader, recently held a webinar on digitalisation in the coal mining industry. The event addressed the current trends in the development of digital technologies in the coal industry, as well as the data culture, ie introduction of the data-based corporate culture.
A key point of the webinar was the presentation of a project to implement and customise the Zyfra OpenMine Fleet Management System (FMS) at the Solntsevsky coal strip mine in Sakhalin, the largest island in Russia, situated in the North Pacific Ocean. East Mining Company was represented by Stanislav Ploshchenko, Deputy CEO for Business Efficiency, Ruslan Karimov Deputy CEO for IT and Digital Transformation, and Evgeny Grabar, Project Manager for ERP System Implementation.
The EMCO specialists presented the first results of the Zyfra Open Mine FMS that has been customised for the needs of the Solntsevsky coal strip mine. The system was put into commercial operation at the mine in December 2019. Almost 9 months of work resulted in an increase of dump truck loads by 10%. With the installation of on-board sensors, it is also now possible to control violations of the security zones. Introduction of a modern fast fuelling system for mining haulage equipment has helped to reduce fuelling time per unit by 2.5 times and increase the equipment performance.
“The main challenges we faced in implementing the system was the size of the company and a large fleet of equipment with almost 150 units inside the mine and about 120 units outside used to deliver the coal from the strip mine to the company’s port facilities of Shakhtersk. So far, all operation modes and procedures have been recorded and most of them are already automated. The next step will be to commission the latest version of the system, which will help to minimise the equipment downtime inside the open-pit and eliminate the lost time of shovels. We also plan to introduce process KPIs for the dispatchers and operators of the equipment,” commented Stanislav Ploshchenko, EMCO’s Deputy CEO for Business Efficiency.
“Efficient operation of modern coal mining companies is impossible without a well-developed transport complex. For this reason, considerable attention is paid to improving equipment productivity, ensuring savings in all types of material resources, optimising vehicle loads and streamlining the coal grades. These challenges cannot be solved without using modern digital technologies,” noted Pavel Rastopshin, Managing Director at Zyfra.
