ABB has launched a new suite of service offerings designed to simplify maintenance and improve the operational health of crucial mining assets. This extends ABB’s comprehensive ABB Care programme to Mining Automation and Hoisting, unifying the organisation’s mining and technology expertise to help customers continuously evolve their approach to maintenance.
Today, the mining industry is under immense pressure to meet production demands while navigating a complex landscape of rising costs, talent shortages and the urgency to meet sustainability commitments. With productivity as one of the top priorities on every major mining organisation’s agenda, minimising downtime is crucial. Traditional approaches to maintenance often rely on reacting to issues after they occur, whereas shifting to a proactive approach not only prevents availability loss but also enhances the overall efficiency and longevity of systems.
This was recently reinforced by the findings from ABB’s World Class Maintenance Standard for mine hoists study. Customers with proactive maintenance strategies had, on average, 15 percent higher availability of their hoists than those primarily using reactive maintenance.
ABB’s Care framework offers proactive and preventive services that ensure operations run smoothly and efficiently. It is a robust standardised service framework built around ABB’s advanced services and digital technologies. Users will benefit from optimised performance, maximised availability, reduced unplanned maintenance and downtime, improved safety and overall savings on maintenance costs.
With ABB Care for Mining Automation, customers will have access to a customisable set of services to select the components that best fit their needs. These services cover everything from alarm management and cybersecurity to lifecycle management and loop performance.
“We know that every mine is different and that is why we have created ABB Care for Mining Automation, so that our customers can choose the right service solutions for them,” says Max Luedtke, Global Business Line Manager for Mining, ABB Process Industries. “ABB delivered its first automation system for a mine in 1975. With over 1 200 control systems delivered today, shaped by partnerships with some of the world’s largest mining organisations, we use the best of automation technology and our industry expertise to bring performance enhancing service solutions to our customers.”
ABB Care for Hoisting offers tiered service plans, designed to address challenges across every element of the hoist system from the powertrain to the brake systems. As standard, every plan includes remote support, guaranteed response times, annual inspections and a maintenance time bank.
“Mine hoist systems are at the very of heart of many mining operations around the world,” says Björn Jonsson, Global Business Line Manager for Hoisting, ABB Process Industries. “They offer the most efficient way to transport heavy loads of ore from the depths, and must therefore operate at the highest possible levels of reliability and productivity. ABB Care for hoisting provides customers with a solution to swiftly adopt a predictive maintenance approach, enabling them to reach to world class maintenance standard established by ABB, and keep these crucial components operating with minimal availability loss.”
