Mining

Leveraging Orion for Bottom Line Growth in the Mining Industry – Increase Mine Productivity, Reduce Risk, Secure Worker Safety

Demand for minerals, metals and fuel in both the Public and Private sectors increases exponentially every year, along with the need to meet increasingly stringent safety and environmental Regulations.

Tracking your mining assets, automating processes and continuously monitoring the quality and safety of the mining environment are the most effective ways to ensure your mine and workers are efficient and productive.

Smarter Technologies Group’s asset tracking and environmental sensor solutions optimise your mining assets at every point in the supply chain and throughout their lifecycle, and monitor factors such as air quality, temperature and pressure. Orion helps you to meet the industry’s legal requirements, lower your carbon footprint and protect your mine and your workforce.

Mining tracking system

How Smarter Technologies Group’s RFID & IoT Technologies Improve Mining

 

At Smarter Technologies , our goals for our mining clients are to create solutions that save them time, reduce their costs, diminish risk, enhance safety and achieve an ecologically sound and sustainable business.

Our mining solutions comprise RFID, GPS and IoT technology, to create a system of tags and gateways, that transmit real-time data and actionable insights over our privately-owned Orion Data Network. Orion helps to transform your business model to one that is data and insights-driven.

Visible & Traceable Mining Assets

Attaching Orion tags to your mining assets means they are visible and traceable at all times, so your mining machinery is always on hand in the right place at the right time, and the risk of theft and misuse is greatly reduced.

A Future Proof Asset Solution

Orion uses cutting-edge, highly advanced technology and is designed for easy integration with automated and IoT-enabled systems. All our solutions are also highly customisable and virtually infinitely scalable, so, as your mine’s tech maturity increases, and you begin to use driverless vehicles and automated drilling, you can still use Orion to monitor, track, optimise and recover all your assets.

Automate Maintenance & Create Predictive Schedules

With Orion you can manage your emergency mining equipment, determine when repairables need to be serviced, optimise rotables and foresee when parts are due to expire.

Orion uses data such as equipment birth record and maintenance history, combined with other variables such as temperature, pressure, vibration and speed to tell you the exact status, location and condition of your mining equipment.

Advanced analytics inform you when a part is due to expire and predicts equipment failure, helping you create predictive maintenance schedules and automatically retire old equipment and reorder replacements and parts.

Automate Interactions with Third Party Suppliers

Orion also improves the way you work with partners such as original equipment manufacturers. You can track the parts you require for mining equipment maintenance and repairs, throughout the supply chain, and identify bottlenecks, optimise routes and automate re-ordering. The parts you need will therefore be available as and when you require them, reducing downtime and increasing productivity.

With Orion carrying out these tasks automatically, maintenance is no longer labour-intensive or expensive and your business becomes increasingly streamlined, agile and more profitable.

Safety of Workers and Mining Equipment

The layout of the mine is critical to the safety of the people who work in it and to protect the equipment that they use as well as being important for optimum productivity. Orion gives you a 360° view of the position of all your equipment and workers, so you can see whether or not your mine layout is efficient and safe.

We also design and create micro weather stations that measure the types and quantities of gas in the air and a host of other factors that can be used prior to and during digging, to help you provide a better, safer working environment.

Abandoned and Working Mine Security

Illegal mining and theft from both abandoned and working mines is a serious global problem. In South Africa, for example, in spite of the fluctuating US economy, the rand gold price is sufficiently high and stable to keep illegal mining profitable. The governing bodies estimate that there are around 14,000 people involved in the South African illegal mining trade. Theft of mining equipment and other valuable mining assets is also a very costly problem all over the world.

Orion mine security solutions allow you to fully secure the perimeter and access points of abandoned and working mines with both covert and overt solutions that easily integrate with CCTV and other security systems to deter and prevent entry.

Orion will send you instant alerts to your mobile devices if anyone attempts to enter without authorisation, so you can take immediate action to protect your mine.

Mining Asset Recovery

Orion has 2 different modes, digital for continuous, passive monitoring, and an analogue beacon mode, which is used in conjunction with our hand-held active RFID readers, to pinpoint the exact location of lost and stolen assets. Smarter Technologies Group’s experts will train your personnel to use the hand-held readers and will also liaise with police on your behalf so that if any of your mining equipment is stolen, it can be quickly recovered. The data Orion collects can be used as evidence to secure arrest and conviction and prevent ongoing illegal activity.

How Does Orion Work?

Passive and Active Asset Monitoring and Tracking

Smarter Technologies Group’s Orion Data Network solutions consist of automated radio frequency identification technology that uses radio frequency waves to transfer data between the Orion gateway readers and the robust weatherproof GPS, non-GPS and switch tags. The tags are attached to your mining assets and can also be worn by workers.

The tags can be customised with a wide variety of different sensors for measuring location, temperature, liquid, gas and solid levels, movement, tilt, tampering and numerous other states and conditions.
Orion tracks the data from the tags in real time, feeding it back to you every 2 minutes when your equipment is stationary and every 15 seconds when the tracked item is in motion.

The system is far more accurate and flexible for location tracking than barcode technology as RFID technology does not require visual confirmation or “line of sight” to read the tags.

Real Time Data Analytics

Orion’s advanced analytics give you real time insights into the status of all your mining assets. This data can be visualised in easy to understand and fully customisable reporting formats.
This information can then be shared with your mine planners, shift supervisors, pit controllers, drilling and blasting teams, experts such as geologists and potential investors and other partners.

Reducing Your Mine’s Carbon Footprint

Investing in our IoT-enabled Orion solutions reduces energy expenditure and provides maintenance and asset utilisation efficiencies, while increasing productivity and reducing reliance on manual processes and human resources. These benefits combine to reduce your overall carbon footprint.

How Orion Data Network works

Benefits

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Automate and standardise mining processes and operations

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Track, monitor and recover mining assets and workers

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Create predictive maintenance schedules

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Reduce your carbon footprint

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Work towards an insights-driven mining business model

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Capitalise on Lower Insurance Premiums

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Aids compliance with industry safety Regulations

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Optimise resources and asset lifecycle and reduce costs

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Benefit from to 75% higher cost savings than other mining asset solutions

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See a fast and significant return on your investment

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Long range site monitoring from 500 meters to 10km+ radius of each Gateway

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Protect both working and abandoned mines from theft and illegal mining

Contact NFC Group

LET’S TALK

Our experts are waiting to answer your enquiries and help design a solution for you.

Call on 0330 223 5000

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Smarter Technologies Group 1 Austin Park, Yeoman Road, Ringwood, BH24 3FG, United Kingdom

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Mining enquiries

Fill out the contact form and let us know how we can help you. Our experts are waiting for you.

Our experts are waiting to answer your enquiries. Smarter Technologies will never use any of the details you supply us for any other purpose.

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