SIGNS TO LOOK FOR
Signs the gap sits between departments
Most of these never reach an executive dashboard. Mine managers perform to the measures set above them, so the cost stays at site.
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Every department reports green, and the mine still misses the month.
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The weekly plan is dead by Wednesday, and the MOS meeting records why.
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Daily ROM or plant feed still swings widely years after MOS go-live.
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Your average day sits well below your best days.
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Leader Standard Work compliance is high, yet output variability has not moved.
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A problem between two departments takes a day to travel up the line and back down.
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A new superintendent follows the MOS to the letter, and tonnes drift some months later.
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The talk has turned to a lower target or more capital.
If three or more sound familiar, your MOS is probably working inside each department while the chain between them goes unmanaged.
WHAT REACHES THE EXECUTIVE
Green on the dashboard
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Departmental KPIs on target
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Last month’s variance explained
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MOS compliance score rising
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Monthly plan attainment reported
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Cost per tonne up, put down to grade or weather
WHAT THE SITE LIVES WITH
Red at the bottleneck
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Bottleneck starved or blocked between handovers
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Nobody owning the next 48 hours across departments
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Routines followed on the surface to get through the shift
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Weekly plan re-cut by mid-week
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Protective spares or crew trimmed in an earlier cost review
Each department can win its own scorecard while the mine loses on the one that counts: tonnes through the bottleneck.
See it for yourself: run the five-minute simulation, or test your own best-day gap with the diagnostic.
CASE: A NSW LONGWALL
Two years after MOS
A NSW longwall had run a full MOS for two years. The planning cascade, Leader Standard Work and meeting cadence were all in place. Daily ROM still swung widely and averaged 9,612 tonnes a day, against a budget of about 13,000.
A Flow Room was then added alongside the MOS. In the first phase, daily ROM averaged 12,047 tonnes, about 25 per cent higher, and the day-to-day swings narrowed. No conventional capacity project was involved.
In the chart, orange is daily ROM two years after MOS and blue is phase 1 after the Flow Room was added. The red arrows show the gap between the average and demonstrated capacity.
WHY IT STALLS
Why a sound MOS still stalls
A good MOS is sound management practice, and its planning cascade and Leader Standard Work belong in any serious operation. It stalls for one reason: it manages departments, while the mine is paid for the whole chain.
In our experience, four things follow.
1 It manages the parts
Each department is measured on its own scorecard, so each can win while the bottleneck waits. We argue that a KPI cascade built from the life-of-mine plan rewards local performance at the expense of the whole.
Deming put it plainly in point 11 of his 14 Points: “Eliminate management by objective. Eliminate management by numbers, numerical goals. Substitute leadership.”
2 Plans assume balanced capacity
When every step is resourced to the same average, ordinary breakdowns and delays pull the whole chain below that average. Operations science has a law for this, and our five-minute mine simulation shows it. Monday’s plan is dead by Wednesday.
3 Its rhythm looks back
MOS meetings explain yesterday’s variance well. Few sites have a meeting that owns the next 12 to 48 hours across departments, so the problems that will cost tomorrow’s tonnes are nobody’s job today.
4 Decisions are made far from authority
The choices that break flow happen at the 6am maintenance meeting and the shift handover, each one sensible within its department. The GM has the authority to override them but is not in those rooms, and overriding a superintendent every day erodes trust.
In our experience a MOS build takes 12 to 18 months to move output, and the gains often level off once the cascade is in place.
THE MISSING LAYER
Thirty minutes a day beside your MOS
The Flow Room adds one daily meeting to the routines you already run. Department heads meet for 30 minutes around one question: what does the bottleneck need from us in the next 12 hours?
Issues that used to climb the line and come back a day later are settled in the room by the people who control the resources. For the rest of the day the mine runs as it always has. John Kotter calls this a dual operating system: a stable hierarchy with a fast, cross-functional network beside it.
What changes tomorrow morning
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One signal opens every review: bottleneck buffer status (green, amber or red), expected against actual at the bottleneck, and the recovery plan for the next 24 to 48 hours.
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Plans are sized to capacity: daily and weekly plans match the bottleneck’s demonstrated rate, and other work is paced so it neither starves nor blocks it.
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Priorities line up: mining, development, maintenance, processing and supply sequence their work by its effect on the bottleneck first.
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Protective capacity is named: the spares, stockpiles and crew time that shield the bottleneck are labelled, so they survive the next cost review.
Your bottleneck might be the CHPP, the crusher, the stope sequence, development or loadout. The routine is the same.
WHO SETS THE MEASURES
Your team changes the KPIs
We do not hand you a new KPI set. Your management team adjusts its own measures once it has watched the system run, and the MOS encodes them into Leader Standard Work and dashboards. Measures a team has set from what it has seen tend to hold through changes of manager.
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Weeks 1 to 4: the Flow Room runs alongside the MOS. Nothing else changes.
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Months 1 to 2: conversations in the room expose where departmental KPIs and bottleneck output disagree.
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Months 2 to 3: the management team proposes its own KPI changes, and the MOS team encodes them.
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Month 3 onward: the adjusted measures sit in Leader Standard Work and dashboards, and the MOS holds the gains.
Maintenance availability becomes
availability of bottleneck equipment, plus buffer health
Mining tonnes become
tonnes to the right place at the right time
Drill fleet utilisation becomes
development metres that feed the bottleneck sequence
Typical refinements. Your team chooses its own. Tonnes, cost per tonne and safety stay as the top-line measures.
THE MOS LOCKS IT IN
The MOS holds the gains
The Flow Room shows the team how the parts connect. The team adjusts its departmental measures. The MOS embeds them in Leader Standard Work, and the behaviour that follows protects the bottleneck, which shows up in the next morning’s Flow Room. Each lap ties departmental measures closer to tonnes.
Part-way through a MOS rollout. The Flow Room runs beside it. Your MOS provider keeps full scope and, by month 3, has KPIs tested against 90 days of bottleneck data instead of generic utilisation targets. We work alongside whoever built your MOS.
COST PER TONNE
Lower cost per tonne from the assets you already run
Much of a mine’s cost is fixed over the month. Hold the bottleneck at its demonstrated rate and that fixed cost is spread over more saleable tonnes, so unit cost falls and becomes more predictable.
Each extra bottleneck hour is worth roughly its rate multiplied by the contribution per tonne. Try the payback calculator on Capital and the Bottleneck to see the same project at the bottleneck and away from it.
EVIDENCE AND LIMITS
Held to what it shows
Through many interventions we have found that in the absence of a Flow Room, the gains fade. Training in the method can lift production quickly, but with no daily routine to protect the bottleneck, the old departmental measures pull output back down. That lesson is why we build on your MOS rather than around it.
Historical interventions in this method have shown improvements in the 10 to 40 per cent range. We give that range as context, never as a forecast for your mine. The method was developed by the late Arrie van Niekerk over more than 20 years and 90 mining engagements. Hendrik Lourens trained under him and has applied it in eight interventions over 12 years.
When the MOS should come first
A Flow Room needs something to plug into. Build the MOS first when:
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the site has no basic operating discipline, such as a planning cascade, standard handovers or a meeting cadence
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safety governance has critical gaps
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the site is greenfield or in early ramp-up
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production is already stable and on budget, and the aim is standardisation across sites
THE EXECUTIVE’S PART
Start with one operating asset
Site-level change lasts when someone above the GM protects it from the pull back to old measures. The KPIs that create pressure at site are set at COO and VP level, so the executive sponsor is the person who can give a contained trial room to work.
1
Check the gap
Run the Best-Day Diagnostic on six months of daily production. The calculation stays in your browser.
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Talk it through
A 30-minute confidential call about the gap, the bottleneck and the limits of the screen.
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Five days on site
A discovery with your site team to find the bottleneck and see how the MOS routines treat it.
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Decide
A go or no-go decision before any wider commitment. If it is a go, the Flow Room starts beside your MOS.
RELATED READING
On this site
Full Potential: when every cost centre improves and the mine loses
Why benchmark-driven savings can remove the capacity a mine needs, and why a conventional MOS may not resolve it.
More capital, or a lower target?
How to point existing capital at the bottleneck, with a payback calculator.
One mine, two scoreboards
A five-minute simulation of a mine where every department reports green.