Removing roadblocks for an optimized gold mining operation

A leading Canadian mining company needed more flexibility and wanted to bring the documentation process in-house, so that they could be in control of their own information and data. Lightship helped them get there.

Canadian Gold Mine

Our client is a Canadian-focused gold mining company. They’ve allowed us to share their story on the condition of anonymity.

12,450

hectares

210,000 oz.

gold eq. produced yearly

$200 mil

revenue

Challenge

A leading Canadian mining company has two core producing assets in Canada. At the largest of these sites, the tailings division’s Quality Control program is all about one thing: “A lot of it is documentation, documentation, documentation,” says the program’s Project Manager.

Using an iPad-based app, the QC team would take photos, do notes, and submit daily, weekly, and quarterly field reviews through the app. The data and reports from that app were sent to the facility’s Engineer of Record. This meant that when the QC team had delays, problems with uploading, or trouble accessing the app, they had to go through the EoR in order to troubleshoot with the app developers.

The QC team needed more flexibility and wanted to bring the documentation process in-house in order to be in control of their own information and data. This was especially important considering the team had other components of the site that weren’t under the direct control of the EoR.

“We would just be uploading daily field reviews and then the team would fill out a physical 5-point card. But to get any metadata out of [our previous app] was next to impossible. We couldn’t tell how many submissions had been done without going in and manually counting them.”

Solution

Lightship was initially implemented in early 2020 and was up and running within 60 days.

As part of the original scope of work, they used Lightship for:

Digitization of infrastructure maps that were then available on mobile devices, including in disconnected environments.
Digitization of all field safety forms and inspections, available on any iOS or Android device.
When any corrective actions or follow up work was noted in daily/weekly inspection forms, Lightship automatically assigned tasks for crews to respond.
Automated daily task scheduling and assignment, providing better visibility for Project Managers working off-site due to COVID-19.

“We’ve been able to track documentation within our team’s safety reports a lot more efficiently. We’ve been able to pull out the metadata of how many submissions per month for each of the forms, and really track that as a metric. We look at a month end report and see if we’re missing anything, which allows us to trigger a conversation with the team in the field and audit it at a higher level. Before we didn’t have that.”

Results

Within one year of implementation, additional use cases were quickly identified by other departments at the mine, including the digitization of their safety equipment maintenance program.

With Lightship:

All safety equipment was geo-tagged catalogued with key information and expiry dates, as well as a barcode.
Employees could scan the equipment barcodes and pull up the equipment history and complete inspections, using Lightship’s mobile application.
All safety equipment was then visible on a digital map, color coded by inspection status.
If a piece of equipment failed an inspection, a work order would be automatically assigned to the equipment owner to repair or replace it.
Compliance reports tracking KPIs were automatically generated and sent out each month.

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