Fleet Management Solution for Mining Operations
When a customer, renowned worldwide for the high-quality fleets and mining equipment they provide to clients around the world, came to us with a unique challenge, blackrock rose to the occasion. The customer needed a fleet management solution that would work in the unique mining environment, a location that has extremely limited connectivity. The team at blackrock put their heads together and came up with an inventive solution – a perfect fix that involved building the software and hardware from scratch.
The solution that resulted exceeded all expectations – not only did it serve our customer’s purpose, but it also became an optimizer and enhancer for their clients’ businesses. Read on to learn how we achieved this.
The Client
Our client is an international pioneer and leader in automobile and truck manufacturing in Europe, with over 75 years of expertise in the field. With 2000+ dealers & customer service points, over ten countries with assembling factories, and an established presence in over 100 markets, the client also supplies fleets and mining equipment to government and privately owned mines.
The Challenge
The company provided the fleets necessary for the operation of mines in a country in the APAC region with a 2–3-year warranty on the vehicles. Due to the inefficient way mines are run, with no fleet management system in place, trucks are often overloaded, leading to wear and tear of the vehicles’ suspension mechanisms. This led to the client having an exponential increase in warranty expenses for these fleets. The hours spent waiting in a queue at excavation sites also resulted in high fuel inefficiencies, a pain point for the mine operating company.
To battle increasing warranty expenses and to give the added benefit of ensuring their customers can tackle fuel inefficiencies and ensure the highest level of safety and efficiency measures for mining personnel, our client set off on the lookout for a real-time tracking system for its trucks. They needed an intelligent GPS-free mining fleet management solution that could work underground, where GPS technology usually failed.
Our Solution
Experion’s solution involved building an IoT-based mining fleet management solution to optimize the end customer’s mining operations, enabling the client to improve the lifespan of the fleet they provide.
Team blackrock developed a LoRa (Long Range) WAN solution to tackle the connectivity issues inside remote mines. Using low power, the LoRa system would have a long range of 15 kilometers in rural areas and higher bandwidth than other IoT technologies. Additionally, a customized web application was developed using multilateral logic to calculate the truck’s location concerning the gateway position, thus enabling real-time tracking. The engagement also included the development of two hardware components.
The mining fleet management solution was also equipped with automated queue management and active truck assignment, thus reducing idling time. Another web-based application was also developed to supervise the fleet using real-time telematics – this enabled the live tracking of trucks and excavators, automatic assigning of trucks to loading sites (based on real-time queues), and generating management and operational reports.
The LoRa-based end nodes installed in the trucks and excavators made it possible to instruct drivers, synchronizing the communications between the vehicles and the control hub.
The stand-out features of the solution include:
- GPS-independent geolocation computation using the LoRa WAN technique
- Bespoke IoT devices installed in mining trucks and excavators
- Transceivers set up along the mining site perimeter to enable seamless communication
- A Control Room application with a dashboard view of live truck locations
- Instant messaging functionality for truck drivers
Business Impact
- The turnaround time of fleet operations improved by 18%
- Fleet utilization became 23% more efficient
- Truck idle time reduced by 17%
- Warranties are not claimed as early or often as before
- The company’s fleets now have a differentiator as compared to other fleets on the market
- Higher fuel efficiency and lower maintenance costs
- The team working on this project won a global innovation award