Prometheus Group has a simple yet effective goal: to help mining companies “produce more, keep their people safe and leave a clean digital record of their processes.”
Those are the words of Prometheus Group Asia-Pacific solution engineering director Stephen Chan, who said the company helps miners carry out equipment maintenance in a safer and easier way through its enterprise asset management (EAM) software, which integrate with enterprise resource planning (ERP) and computerised maintenance management systems (CMMS).
“What you’ll find with these more generalised systems is that they’re not built specifically for miners and don’t understand industry-specific language, whereas our software has been developed over years of working in the industry directly with our customers to make planning and scheduling more user-friendly for the people at the coal face: engineers, planners, schedulers, safety administrators,” he said.
As mines invest heavily in technology designed to improve safety, it’s critical to ensure those systems are functioning when workers need them most.
Installing equipment is one thing, but making sure it is inspected and maintained on time, every time, is another challenge entirely. This is where Prometheus solutions come into play.
Prometheus’ GWOS-AI platform uses artificial intelligence (AI) to assist in the planning and scheduling of your maintenance work orders, reducing the risk of delayed or missed servicing, and helping prevent equipment failures and unplanned downtime.
Chan said this platform can be a significant asset to miners, as the introduction of the Workplace Exposure Limits (WELs) for airborne contaminants places greater focus on dust-suppression equipment.
“The two important questions miners will be asked are: ‘is your dust suppression equipment working?’ and ‘is it being deployed when it’s needed?’” he said.
Rather than navigating multiple systems or digging through technical documentation, workers can rely on GWOS-AI to draw from a best practice maintenance library and their own existing records, procedures and operational data to help plan out the tasks and materials required to effectively and efficiently complete work orders.
“GWOS-AI has been trained by more than 20 years of real-world maintenance data to standardise and accelerate a customer's process based on how they currently manage maintenance,” Chan said.
“It can effectively mirror how an organisation’s maintenance team would build out a schedule, but within minutes”
For sites managing extensive assets, that capability can significantly reduce the time spent on creating plans and schedules, while enabling workers to focus on the complex dependencies required to execute the job.
“Typically, it can take days or even weeks to build out a schedule, and if things change, there’s significant time spent to re-schedule it,” Chan said.
“By inserting AI into this process, we can reduce that process to minutes.”
Since GWOS-AI understands and uses industry-specific, natural language, Chan said it can help bridge the experience gap for newer workers—turning the usual months of tedious training to understand the nuanced planning process into a self-guided assistant who you can ask anything but the footy scores, allowing them to quickly produce quality output. For veterans using the tool, it becomes a trusted advisor and can quickly produce the baseline on which they refine.
Another key component of the Prometheus offering is the company’s electronic permitting and safety solution, ePAS, which provides operators with a complete Integrated Safe System of Work (ISSOW), giving greater visibility into safety permits, isolations, and approvals while maintaining a complete digital record of every action taken.
This eliminates potential communication gaps in paper-based processes, which can be difficult to both track and audit. In this case, the permit planner adds a work category to the permit HIRA (Hazard Identification & Risk Assessment) that will identify if airborne contaminants are a hazard, and if so, it will automatically recommend appropriate controls and enforce air quality as part of the permit’s requirements for release. In the case of dust suppression equipment, that digital record can prove invaluable.
“If you’re using paper-based processes, it’s a lot harder to keep a record of what controls are in place to keep your workers safe and to prove compliance to an auditor,” Chan said.
“With ePAS, every part of the permit process is time-stamped and recorded, giving miners a permanent digital audit trail which can demonstrate compliance and identify maintenance issues. Instead of digging through paperwork that may or may not exist, the evidence is readily available and can be pulled up in an instant to show if safety procedures are being followed and if maintenance issues have contributed to a failure.”
By combining ePAS with GWOS-AI, mining operations also gain greater visibility into the safety of their workforce during maintenance activities. The systems can identify potential hazards based on the work performed and visualise the interactions of work and permit status, enabling miners to implement the required preventive controls so maintenance can proceed.
Chan said this helps miners show that they not only have safety equipment in place, but are confident it will operate effectively when needed.
“Having a maintenance program is obviously important, but if you can’t effectively and safely execute it, you are exposing both your people and your operations to risk,” he said.
“This is a strong case for digitising that end-to-end process. Our GWOS-AI and ePAS systems can drive consistency, efficiency and safety into your asset maintenance program by design, providing auditability when you really need it.”