Management of physical assets at Purga Quarry

Abstract

[Abstract]: South East Queensland is growing at an average of 55,300 people per year, with the majority of this growth occurring in the Western Corridor. The Western Corridor is referred to as the areas surrounding Ipswich and the Lockyer and Fassifern Valleys including the growth suburbs of Springfield, Ripley, Ebenezer and Amberley. (SEQRP 2005-2026, 2005). Purga Quarry is the only quarry operated by Boral that services the Western Corridor of South East Queensland. The quarry supplies roadbase and aggregates to road and infrastructure projects currently under construction is this region. Boral’s SEQ Quarry Division acknowledged that the current production output needed to be increased to meet the current and future demands, so it therefore enlisted the quarry as part of its first wave of the ‘Operational Excellence’ project. Along with this project, a more efficient asset management method was needed for the current equipment at the quarry. In this project, research was carried out on the way that the current assets such as the plant and load and haul equipment on the site are managed. From this research, various recommendations were introduced including prestart checklists to be filled out every morning for both plants as well as the load and haul equipment, fortnightly scheduled maintenance days for both plants to be undertaken on Saturdays so that the downtime is minimised, introducing scheduled maintenance plans and plans to replace parts on the assets as well as inputting these asset management plans into an asset management program as the program will automatically show when an item has been changed. Some of these recommendations have been implemented and there also has been an addition in tonnes being produced as well as a decrease in unscheduled equipment downtime. All of the other recommendations have been planned to be implemented over the next few months. As these ideas are implemented they will have to be continually monitored to determine if unscheduled equipment downtime has decreased with the amount of tonnes produced, increasing.