Site: Bathurst, NB Canada

Description of the Site: The Bathurst mine, more than one mile underground, produced primarily zinc and copper, concentrating the product for a sister smelter plant in the Bathurst area.

Nature of the Opportunity: As zinc prices plummeted in 1997, the mine needed dramatic cost improvements to stay viable in the Noranda system. Maintenance costs were a very large portion of the operating budgets, and capital equipment utilization rates needed to improve.

Noranda leadership downsized the worker complement in late 1997 as an immediate reaction to mine economics. At this point, based on the reduction in the maintenance force, improved productivity was required from an unhappy workforce to keep the mine producing and producing to lower cost targets than ever before.

What We Did: We began our work with an Assessment of current practices and attitudes, as well as measuring baseline performance in key maintenance indicators. Reactive maintenance was found to be the norm, with high overtime and low productivity.

Working with and outstanding cross-functional team, we jointly developed a design of the new system for planned maintenance. This system was piloted in the concentrator, resulting in eliminating all the identified work backlog, and bringing overtime to less than 5%. The systems was then installed in the surface area (including the lift and utilities), and later in the year, in the mine itself.

Noranda continued to implement the system after SAMI's departure, recognizing that the change was difficult, but necessary for their survival.

Results: The work at the mine resulted in more work activities being planned and scheduled as well as more hours being applied to scheduled work. Emergent work decreased and the number of hours spent on PM activities increased. On the whole, Noranda was able to reduce Maintenance labor costs.