Lean Mining, Productivity and Occupational Health and Safety: An Expert-Elicitation Study

Abstract

The implementation of lean tools in the Canadian mining industry is still in its beginnings. To the best of our knowledge, published information and articles on this subject are scarce. Consequently, the impacts of using lean tools on productivity and workers' health and safety in this field are still unclear and need more investigations to better integrate the technical aspects of lean with Occupational Health and Safety (OHS). Therefore, this study aims to provide insights about lean mining in Canada. The objective of this paper is to propose a preliminary road-map for lean implementation considering OHS concerns in Canadian underground gold-mining. To meet this objective, a set of lean tools (i.e. VSM, 5S, Kaïzen, TPM, SMED and LIC) as independent variable, and OHS indicators (i.e. "struck by an object" and "body reaction" risks) and an economic indicator (i.e. daily advance rate) as dependent variable were selected. An expert-elicitation study was conducted recruiting 7 experts from academia and practitioners active in the mining sector. Results show that the majority of experts agreed on a possible positive impact on a mine's daily advance rate after implementing 5S and TPM, and a reduction of the risk rate of "struck by object" among workers by implementing Kaïzen.

Transportation Performance Measurement for Coal Mining: A Review and Framework

“…The implementation of improvement initiatives such as lean in the mining sector has been studied previously using lean tools such as kaizen, value stream mapping (VSM), total productive maintenance (TPM), and single minute exchange die (SMED). The focus of these studies was on the gold mining companies in Canada and the results showed a positive impact of the tools on productivity and work safety (Nemati et al 2019). Another study also discussed the challenges in coal mining operations (Yu et al 2016) and those observed to be prevalent include low productivity, low efficiency, safety, and environmental issues (Maunzagona and Telukdarie 2017).…”

“…The term "Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE)" was first introduced by (Nakajima 1988) as an indicator of manufacturing equipment productivity. It has been used to measure the success of implementing the total productive maintenance (TPM) program (Cheah et al 2020) and also as a standard indicator to evaluate production productivity (Soltanali and Khojastehpour 2021;Chikwendu et al 2020;Ng et al 2020).…”

“…OEE has recently been used as a benchmark to determine the overall efficiency of a plant by comparing its present value to future targeted value in order to determine the factors to be improved to achieve the desired OEE level. A previous study considered 85% as the benchmark score and this value is suggested to be used as a reference (Nakajima 1988;Dal et al 2000).…”