LOURENS DU PLESSIS We are committed to assisting our customers in Africa to remain globally competitive
Mine management solutions provider Modular Mining Systems (MMS) is continuously working on making value-added enhancements to its core technologies, says MMS MD Lourens du Plessis.
He says customer feedback plays an important role in how the company’s solutions evolve over time. “By engaging with customers to understand how they use or products, we are better able to make changes that will increase the value in use that our solutions provide,” he explains.
Further, the company’s Product Innovation group also examines trends occurring in non-mining technology sectors, for example, the automotive and aviation industries, to identify how it might leverage advancements in those areas to enhance its product portfolio, he adds.
These technologies include the Dispatch fleet management system, MineCare maintenance management solution, ProVision machine guidance solution, MineAlert safety management tools, and MasterLink wireless network solutions.
The Dispatch system is the company’s flagship product, which enables clients to optimise their haulage cycles, maximise production, and increase equipment use. The MineCare solution helps mines increase fleet uptime and availability and reduce mobile equipment life-cycle costs, as it provides the information and tools needed to monitor the health of an entire fleet in real time.
The ProVision solution, available for shovels, loaders, dozers and drills, uses a high-precision Global Positioning System to provide continuous navigation and guidance to equipment operators, increasing productivity and facilitating the realisation of planned targets and tasks.
The MineAlert Collision Awareness system works to improve operator situational awareness to increase safety and mitigate vehicle-to-vehicle collision risk. The MasterLink wireless network solutions enable robust, reliable and secure data transmission on a high-availability architecture for bandwidth-intensive, openpit mining environments.
Mining Indaba
MMS exhibited its Dispatch, ProVision, MineCare and MineAlert solutions at the Investing in African Mining Indaba, which took place in Cape Town from February 5 to 8 this year. These products are part of the company’s IntelliMine mine management platform, which targets the key areas of operations, planning maintenance and safety.
The company also highlighted its Mine Plan Compliance programme, a technology- based consulting service designed to ensure that customers receive the best applied value from their MMS technologies and increase their ability to bridge the gap between planning and execution.
“Our primary intent at the Indaba was to demonstrate the benefits, including boosted performance, greater process control and increased return on investment, that mines can achieve by partnering with the correct third-party consultants,” he notes.
He states that MMS has been investing in South Africa since 1985, the year in which MMS first installed the Dispatch system at a mine in Phalaborwa, in Limpopo. The company established an office in Johannes- burg, in Gauteng, in 2000 and has continued to enlarge its regional footprint by offering solutions that help customers to mine better and smarter, and create more value for stakeholders.
Du Plessis points out that South Africa is a mineral-rich country and prospects for further development remain strong, adding that several new projects have been initiated across Africa over the past ten years and these operations are embracing technology and world-class mining practices.
“We firmly believe that Africa is the future of mining worldwide, and we are committed to assisting our customers in Africa to remain globally competitive,” he concludes.