GBI’s award-winning human factors engineering process OPTIDRAGTM should raise great interest when it is released internationally later this year. According to GBI it is the only product of its kind in the world. OPTIDRAG analyses people’s abilities, demographic factors and personality to predict their effectiveness in operating mine equipment. It has been successfully adopted by mine operators throughout Australia over the past two years, generating returns in excess of A$400,000 per operator trained.
The innovation is set to go global in November when it is introduced to leaders in mining at an international conference. The OPTIDRAG workshop, led by GBI’s CEO Graham Lumley, is a showcase event of the inaugural 2010 Surface Mining Asset Optimisation Conference – Adding Real Value. International Mining is the global media partner for this event. Lumley said the workshop “Getting the Most From Your People” was generating interest around the globe. “OPTIDRAG matches human potential with technology to ensure employers in the resource industry are recruiting the right people for their machinery to achieve the highest productivity and profit.
“For less than two hours of an employee’s time (less than half an hour for a potential dragline operator) a mine can know how well a person is going to perform on a multi-million dollar piece of equipment. Assuming one in three tested people is good enough the value of the knowledge through additional productivity is up to A$150,000 per tested person per year. Perhaps not surprisingly, companies are keen to hear how this could work for them, and indications are that this workshop will be popular.”
Many companies are asking themselves, “I have to train operators so why don’t we focus that training on the potential stand-out performers”.
Lumley said the applications for OPTIDRAG had potential beyond the resource industry. “To date OPTIDRAG has been a solution for draglines and the mining industry, but we also see that it is a model for other industries,” he said. “When used with structured interviews and work history the correlation of the OPTIDRAG system results to productivity and safety is substantially higher than any other process around the world.”
In 2009, GBI’s OPTIDRAG was awarded the Queensland Engineering Award for Excellence in Research, Development and Innovation and was showcased as one of the fifty outstanding engineering projects in Australia.
The 2010 Surface Mining Asset Optimization Conference – Adding Real Value will be held in Milwaukee and will showcase mining intelligence, provide up-to-date knowledge on what is being achieved by mines with best practice performance and explain what suppliers and mines around the world are doing to add real value to mining operations. Other workshops at the five-day conference include Data Mining – Getting the Most from Your Data by Trevor Trott of GBI and Getting the Most from Your Cost Accounting by Rob Beckman of Red Button Group (previously from RioTinto). For more information on the 2010 Surface Mining Asset Optimisation Conference, November 2010, visit http://www.sm-assetopt2010.com/
