(1) The Broken Stocks Saga

Many years ago in an iron ore mine I was the Grade Control Superintendent, leading a team charged with producing weekly stockpiles of lump and fines ore. This position was located in Mine Production Dept rather than Mine Planning Dept. Between the two ore stockpiles, there were a total of 8 target qualities with very tight target bands - so quality was "king".

Mine Planning Department were responsible for short term schedules of all mining equipment over a 3 month time frame, the primary schedule driver being that of the excavators mining "specification product" on a weekly basis.

Now broken stocks (material already blasted) are extremely critical in weekly ore stockpile construction, as they’re pretty much all there is available to mine from within that time frame. We came into a situation where we had very high phosphorus in our broken stocks, which made it near impossible to build stockpiles to our quality targets.

Our problem was that Mine Planning Dept produced plans that effectively continued to add target quality material at one end, while we attempted to take target quality material off the other end. Consequently the high phos broken stocks weren't being remedied. So for a sustained period of nearly 2 months, the broken stocks continued at high phos levels and during this entire period we really struggled to produce "on spec" weekly stockpiles. And yes this was very much a saga for me with the heat we drew from sending out "off spec" product!!

This situation was a catalyst for many learnings for me personally and these will be discussed in my following posts.