Leading Copper Mine · 2022

Rethinking Short-range Mine Planning

Journey map to visualize the day-to-day short-range mine planning process in order to co-create solutions for pain points.

Stakeholder interviews
8
Contextual inquiries
6
Mine miles driven
40+
Wireframes
45+

Process

Research Process

Through contextual inquiries we learned that the dusty and often harsh conditions of mining sites posed difficulties in both communication among team members and in the accurate collection of data. Contextual interviews were often interrupted by minor and major incidents.
The mining sector's cautious approach towards the adoption of new technologies and methodologies while still relying on manual, paper processes posed an initial barrier to the introduction of innovative solutions.
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Research Synthesis Readout & Co-creation

Through perseverance of the team, and the established trust from both mine leadership and the people on the ground, our team was able to solidify a cohesive end-to-end journey to depict the entire short-range mine planning process. Using this end-to-end journey we collectively mapped tasks, actors, pain points and systems throughout the short-range mine planning process to identify initial opportunities through applying our research insights.

The personas derived from contextual inquiries represented the deep insights we gathered through in-depth conversations while in the field.
Mapping the short-range mine planning journey.
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Future State Definition

Based on the research synthesis and the co-creation session's concepts we set out to define actionable opportunities through a future-state service blueprint.

Deliverables

Connected Fleet Planning

The Gantt at the center of Mine Plan is more than a schedule — it enforces a rule: when one piece of equipment stops, the plan finds its paired equipment new work instead of letting it idle. A companion Scenario Planning tool makes that same logic explorable on demand, letting a planner fault any link in the Drill → Shovel → Truck → Mill chain and compare real responses side by side before committing to one.

The live Gantt for Pit 3 — a drill's Delay block and its paired shovel's Relocated block always sit in the same time column, so the cascade reads at a glance.
Presentation Mode swaps in a read-only scenario view for the 1:00 PM Weekly Meeting, with live review notes already flagging the day’s disruption.
Simulating a fault: Truck T-89 goes down mid-shift. The map and chain both show where the break is — and what it's about to cost.
Choosing to relocate S-47 instead of waiting for repair — its marker actually slides across the mini-map to Bench 5 in real time.
A different fault, same chain: Drill D-34 down leaves S-47 exposed to a shrinking reserve of broken ground.
When the shovel itself is down, the second response is explicitly marked unavailable — Copper Ridge has no standby loader, so the tool says so instead of pretending every option always works.
A fourth, compound scenario: drill and truck down at once. S-47 is boxed in from both sides.
The "do nothing" option is deliberately the worst choice on the board — styled in red, not green, so the cost of inaction reads as a cost rather than a success.
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Dispatch & Incident Response

When a haul road closes mid-shift, Dispatch surfaces ranked responses instead of a blank alert — each one showing its real cost and, where it applies, a note that the same fix already worked last time. A dispatcher documents the decision inline rather than losing it to a radio call.

A crack closes Ramp 4 at 6:58 AM. The top-ranked response is flagged as the one that resolved the same problem in 12 minutes last time.
Comparing an alternative — holding trucks at the loading face — makes its tradeoff (staged, idle trucks) explicit before it’s chosen.
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Maintenance & Task Handoff

A shovel's preventive-maintenance window and the live production schedule are the same document, not two systems a planner has to reconcile by hand. When a PM conflicts with an upcoming mill outage, the resulting task thread carries the decision — and the maintenance calendar — in one place.

The week's maintenance calendar and fleet KPIs, each stat card given its own honest presentation instead of a repeated template — a trend, a target comparison, or a plain number with context.
A shovel's PM window conflicts with an upcoming mill outage. The five-step thread between Mine Planner and Maintenance Planner ends with the plan updated and the reasoning preserved.
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Shift Handoff & Field Reporting

Observations don't wait for a desktop. On a pit tour, a supervisor logs a hazard from a phone with no signal — it queues locally and publishes the moment connectivity returns. Back at shift change, that same observation shows up in the handoff annotations, discussed and reassigned before the outgoing crew leaves.

Every field note from the shift, addressable and threaded — a coolant-temperature spike gets a reply and a note on the next PM window before the shift ends.
The same handoff view's task tracker reassigns open items between day and night crews, tied back to the incidents logged that shift.
On a pit tour with no signal, a hazard gets photographed first — the offline banner is persistent, not an error state.
Circling the exact spot, setting a priority, and confirming the auto-attached geotag — all before deciding whether this is worth flagging.
Saved and queued to publish the moment signal returns — plus a private note that never leaves the reporter's own notebook.
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Equipment Intelligence

Every major asset gets its own record — real specs, a weekly production trend, wear on the parts that actually fail, and a history log that reads like the shift's own story compressed onto one machine.

S-47's profile: a P&H 4100XPC at 91% availability, its bucket-teeth wear tracked alongside the week's tonnage.
D-34's profile mid-fault — availability and utilization both down, the same hydraulic delay from the Gantt showing up as the top history entry.
T-89's cycle time is up 4 minutes since the morning's ramp reroute — the kind of detail that only shows up once you look at one machine at a time.
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A Day at Copper Ridge

Every screen above is really one day, told from a different angle. This is that day laid end to end — a planned shift disturbed twice, and neither disruption stopped a piece of equipment.

The shift opens on Scenario 1 at 6:00 AM. By 6:58 the first disruption has already landed.
The day closes with the score kept honestly: zero hours of shovel idle time, and two disruptions absorbed without stopping a single machine.
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