CUTTING IDLE TIME UNDERGROUND

WITH IDLE TIME A SIGNIFICANT HIDDEN COST IN UNDERGROUND MINES, MST GLOBAL HAS PIONEERED A SOLUTION.

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Deep underground, a bolter sits idle as workers wait for the next mining task to begin, with delays upstream pushing back the schedule.

For 30 minutes, nothing happens; multiply that pause across shifts, machines and sites, and the cost to productivity and profitability quickly becomes clear.

To understand the scale of this challenge and how new digital tools are tackling it, Australian Mining spoke with MST Global about the company’s HELIX Dispatch platform.

“A face sitting idle for 30 minutes might seem minor, but it becomes a real opportunity cost when idle time becomes a habit,” MST Global general manager – product management and marketing Jason Hartley said.

“By stepping back and looking at the cumulative effect across a quarter or year, you’re talking about thousands of lost production hours and millions of dollars in value.”

For much of the industry’s history, idle time was difficult to track in any meaningful way. Operators relied on manual logs, shift notes and production reports, which were often inconsistent and incomplete.

“With digital systems, idle time is now visible in real time, broken down by crews, machines and tasks, making it easier to identify patterns and take action,” Hartley said. “That visibility changes the whole conversation because it turns what was once guesswork into actionable intelligence.”

The true cost of idle time is not always in the minutes lost, but in the ripple effects across an operation.

A loader that sits idle can stall drilling cycles, crews waiting for instructions can hold up development headings, and one delay can cause an entire shift to fall behind.