Production and maintenance performance analysis: Manual versus semi-automatic LHDs

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to evaluate and analyse the production and maintenance performance of a manual and a semi-automatic load haul dump (LHD) machine to find similarities and differences. Design/methodology/approach - Real time process-, operational- and maintenance data, from an underground mine in Sweden, have been refined and aggregated into KPIs in order to make the comparison between the LHDs. Findings - The main finding is the demonstration of how production and maintenance data can be improved through information fusion, showing some unexpected results for maintenance of automatic and semi-automatic LHDs in the mining industry. It was found that up to one third of the manually entered workshop data are not consistent with the automatically recorded production times. It is found that there are similarities in utilization and filling rate but differences in produced tonnes/machine hour between the two machines. Originality/value - The originality in this paper is the information fusion between automatically produced production data and maintenance data which increases the accuracy of reliability analysis data. Combining the production indicator and the maintenance indicator gives a common tool to the production and maintenance departments. This paper shows the difference in both maintenance and production performance between a manual and semi-automatic LHD.