EMBRACING NEW WAYS OF WORKING

MINING IS BUILT ON DECADES OF ROUTINE, BUT BROKK IS PROVING THERE'S A SMARTER WAY WITH ITS REMOTE-CONTROLLED ROBOTS.

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Mining is an industry built in large part on grit, tradition and endurance, qualities that have shaped generations of workers and driven the sector's ongoing success.

Yet, in an industry so often rooted in doing things “the way they have always been done”, there’s a danger that experience can harden into inertia. Processes that once defined efficiency can, over time, become barriers to progress. As pressures mount, from safety expectations to environmental demands and operating margins, rethinking how to work underground could be a key to greater outcomes.

As far back as 2020, there were murmurs of embracing and accelerating the use of technology and, where possible, encouraging remote work.

KPMG’s ‘Establishing a new mining workforce’ report did just that, leaning on the COVID pandemic as an opportunity to take stock of an adaptable and flexible workforce and foster a greater push towards even more robust health and safety initiatives.

“Technologies can augment tasks and offer alternative ways to deliver work remotely, introducing new skills and capabilities into the workforce,” the report stated. “These emerging technologies mean that the sector needs to look beyond solely transforming whole roles and instead reimagine all roles by transforming parts of them.

“Consider that some elements of a role could be done remotely, could be automated or need to be done onsite, therefore resplicing what a particular role might be, and rejoining the capabilities with a consideration of how the capability can be delivered to create new roles.”

While at the time this may have been considered something of a radical change in how work is done on a mine site, finding ways to increase output while decreasing risk is now commonplace.