Fleet Technical Availability — The Foundation of Mine Productivity
When people talk about mine productivity, they usually start with volumes, speed and logistics: how many cubic metres were moved, how fast haul trucks are running, how efficiently excavators are loaded.
All of that matters. But behind these metrics sits one fundamental factor: the technical availability of the fleet.
A machine under repair produces nothing. Every hour that a 130-tonne haul truck spends in the workshop instead of the pit is not just a maintenance cost. It is lost production that usually cannot be recovered within the same shift.
Mining is a continuous flow. When one element drops out, the impact spreads across the system: excavators wait, trucks are reallocated, cycles become unstable, and the plan starts to slip.
At a large open-pit mine, the fleet may include hundreds of units. Each machine is a complex system with thousands of components exposed to wear, fatigue and degradation. Breakdowns will always happen. The real question is how predictable they are, and how prepared the operation is before they happen.
That is what technical availability really measures: how much of the time the equipment is actually available for work.
The difference between 85% and 92% availability at the scale of a large mine is not just seven percentage points. It can mean tens of thousands of machine hours per year. Those hours either become production and revenue, or disappear into downtime.
With today’s cost of equipment and spare parts, the gap between reactive and proactive maintenance can easily become hundreds of millions in lost value.
But to move from reactive to proactive, a mine first needs to learn how to listen to its equipment.
Read more — in our LinkedIn www.linkedin.com/company/oesventures/
When people talk about mine productivity, they usually start with volumes, speed and logistics: how many cubic metres were moved, how fast haul trucks are running, how efficiently excavators are loaded.
All of that matters. But behind these metrics sits one fundamental factor: the technical availability of the fleet.
A machine under repair produces nothing. Every hour that a 130-tonne haul truck spends in the workshop instead of the pit is not just a maintenance cost. It is lost production that usually cannot be recovered within the same shift.
Mining is a continuous flow. When one element drops out, the impact spreads across the system: excavators wait, trucks are reallocated, cycles become unstable, and the plan starts to slip.
At a large open-pit mine, the fleet may include hundreds of units. Each machine is a complex system with thousands of components exposed to wear, fatigue and degradation. Breakdowns will always happen. The real question is how predictable they are, and how prepared the operation is before they happen.
That is what technical availability really measures: how much of the time the equipment is actually available for work.
The difference between 85% and 92% availability at the scale of a large mine is not just seven percentage points. It can mean tens of thousands of machine hours per year. Those hours either become production and revenue, or disappear into downtime.
With today’s cost of equipment and spare parts, the gap between reactive and proactive maintenance can easily become hundreds of millions in lost value.
But to move from reactive to proactive, a mine first needs to learn how to listen to its equipment.
Read more — in our LinkedIn www.linkedin.com/company/oesventures/