The work of coal producer Sasol Mining’s Operations Excellence Review and Enablement team, established in 2011, has resulted in productivity jumps of 8% to 15% for the company and the attainment of daily targets has doubled in some cases, management and operations consultancy BMGI senior client partner Alex Wagner says.

The key responsibility of this team, of which BMGI and other support groups and companies are a part, is to help Sasol’s businesses use the principles and operations ‘excellence’ tools and techniques to improve the workplace and sustain changes that take place, he says.

BMGI has been a partner to Sasol Mining for the past four years, helping the company to implement Enterprise Lean Six Sigma as part of its process- improvement strategy.

“Enterprise Lean Six Sigma is a well-known structured problem-solving process, which can be applied within a business to solve specific problems in a sustainable way,” Wagner explains.

Enterprise Lean Six Sigma solves problems in a structured way, which is at the core of the Sasol Mining Operations Excellence programme, he adds.

BMGI assisted Sasol in internalising the method by training key personnel and driving some key projects.

While Enterprise Lean Six Sigma is used for fairly complex projects, BMGI also assisted Sasol in implementing the Score methodology for projects at shop-floor level that involve aspects such as the elimination of waste, Wagner says.

Through the Operations Excellence Review and Enablement team, Sasol Mining has defined what operations excellence actually means, he says, adding that using this definition as a reference has enabled Sasol Mining to measure itself continually and identify the next area of opportunity or improvement.

Meanwhile, the team was awarded the Services Team of the Year award at the yearly Sasol Mining Inyanda awards in October last year, as a result of the productivity improvement results achieved.

“We have seen huge strides in productivity improvement in the sections where the team has worked and it is significant that these improvements are apparent after only a few months, rather than years,” Sasol Mining operations excellence GM Lucky Kgatle says.

He adds that BMGI provides the benefit of an outside perspective. “We can sometimes be guilty of operational blindness and need to be objective, as an outsider would be, to see what is missing and what needs to be changed. That is what BMGI is to us. It adds objectiveness to our engagements with our operations teams. BMGI also has a depth of industry knowledge and process understanding, which gives the Operations Excellence Review and Enablement team credibility within the wider Sasol Mining team.”

BMGI believes the success of this team is a good example of how structured problem solving can work in a complex environment such as a mining operation,” Wagner adds.