Thiess has set a world record for the highest material moved in a 12-month period by a Liebherr R 9600 excavator at MACH Energy’s Thiess Mount Pleasant Operation.
17 million bank cubic metres across 6,840 operating hours, moving an average of 1.4 million cubes every month for 12 consecutive months. The excavator worked just short of 2500 BCM’s per hour and was operating for 96 per cent of the year.
Now that just looks like a bunch of numbers, but for the team who worked on that machine for 12 months it means hours of hard work, working towards a goal that has never been achieved before.
Daniel Hayes, the Mt Pleasant Operations Project Manager, said they already had two of the 9600’s on site so they knew they were successful, but this one far exceeded what they thought was possible.
“It pretty much walked off the pad and hit the ground running.
“The machine was available for 96 per cent of the year which is phenomenal. We had no major component failures, the planning and maintenance teams were able to make sure it didn’t have substantial down time.
“Everyone is so proud of the achievement, there’s lots of smiling faces around. There’s a sense of ownership from the whole site to hit that number; we’re competitive in mining so everyone was excited to deliver something no one had seen before,” Daniel said.
Troy Bishop, Maintenance Superintendent – Field, said it was truly a collaborative effort.
“It’s not just the people pulling the levers on the excavator, it’s a real collective project. Everyone from the drill and blast team to the tech services crew to make sure the mine plan is there, the execution, the production side of it, making sure everything is right and the circuits are spot on.
“There’s a lot of background stuff that we simply nailed,” said Troy.
“That this has been a massive effort from our maintenance team, from ensuring the maintenance plan aligns with production requirements to the crew on the tools executing work to a high standard to help reduce breakdowns.”
Daniel said it’s even more exciting for the site that the achievement has been recognised globally by Liebherr.
“Once we identified that we could take this thing as far as we possibly could we just kept going. There were certainly bragging rights and milestones we could hit, and it’s a global benchmark that Liebherr recognised, so people invested their time and effort to achieve it. If there was anything that was going to stand in their way of delivering this milestone it was flagged and dealt with.”
