Is the High Cost of Doing Business in the MMM Industry Too Heavy a Load to Carry?

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Would you, or could you, do more to help your company’s profitability if you were financially compensated? That is, would you purposely look for opportunities to save money, lower operating costs, improve workflow, and ultimately, maximize profitability, if there were a financial incentive for each and every initiative you suggested, scoped, and rolled out. In theory, it sounds nice; but in reality it isn’t used often and is extremely difficult to sustain.

A lot of companies  use some form of a Six Sigma, Lean Enterprise, DMAIC, Agile Manufacturing methodology to drive continuous improvement within their enterprise. (It is especially used for new employees.) But a recent Schneider Electric survey found that while 79% of our SimSci customers intend to implement some form of continuous improvement this year, the majority (85%) plan to use software to meet their goals and more than half (58%) will also use training. What’s interesting in these findings is that both Six Sigma-related methodology and Financial incentives are the least used.

So if Continuous Improvement is better, what is it? Continuous Improvement is the pursuit of safe, profitable, and reliable operations by empowering employees to persistently evaluate and improve processes with respect to their efficiency, effectiveness, and flexibility. To drive these initiatives, you must first identify the business objectives, opportunity size, and roll-out sites.  The next step is to then implement advanced technology to meet the objectives, and finally, report and evaluate the results.

Within the volatile Mining, Minerals & Metals (MMM) the high cost of doing business tops the mining industry trends and predicting future demand is difficult. Cost controls, return on capital, and commodity prices are the industry’s biggest concerns. The drop in commodity prices puts additional pressure on operations excellence and profitability.

SimSci by Schneider Electric is uniquely qualified to execute continuous improvement solutions by helping MMM clients align and prioritize their business objectives—reducing energy usage, expanding operator agility, and driving competitiveness. Our technology can be integrated into your plant to drive advanced process control, performance monitoring, data reconciliation, and optimization. Intelligent visualization is employed to report role-based information in a timely fashion for enhanced decision support.

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