Since its introduction in 2003, the MineCare solution has provided mine personnel with the information and tools they need to monitor the health of their fleets in real time, allowing mines to proactively reduce component degradation and prevent catastrophic failures. The MineCare 3 solution builds upon this foundation with new features, benefits and capabilities to help mines increase and maintain operational continuity. Some of the system’s many new features include:

• Cloud-based deployment for simplified installation, upgrades, and management;
• Geographic map view for heightened mine visibility in real time;
• Advanced, intelligent data collection, monitoring, and analytics capabilities;
• Real-time visual equipment health tracking;
• Component-level problem detection and alarms;
• Multi-equipment trending to predict potential failures and assist in proactive planning; and
• Streamlined, user-configurable dashboards for at-a-glance information.

The MineCare 3 solution’s advanced cloud computing, data monitoring, and analytics capabilities can help to resolve equipment issues quickly by predicting specific failure modes before they occur and enabling a condition-based maintenance approach. Users can specify continuous or conditional data-monitoring options via dynamic, user-configurable dashboards, in support of specific maintenance management goals, and then perform predictive trending for early detection of abnormal behaviour, rates of change, and parameters outside of normal operating ranges. These capabilities also minimise interruption to daily workflows and deploy application updates to multiple devices simultaneously.

The introduction of a cloud-based, Software as a Service (SaaS) subscription configuration, can eliminate costly IT infrastructure investments, improve data storage efficiency, and simplify installation, upgrades, and management. SaaS provides customers with an excellent total cost of ownership, requiring no capital expenditure investments and limited network communication requirements. Furthermore, its high scalability allows mines to efficiently and cost-effectively monitor and manage a single machine, or thousands of units across an entire enterprise, from one centralised location.

Michael Lewis, vice president, product innovation at Modular Mining Systems, said: “It’s an ideal solution for any sized organisation. Small mines to entire corporations can manage the health of all of their assets from anywhere in the world.”

Since the MineCare 3 solution eliminates the need for costly onsite server infrastructure, it can provide additional benefits for small mines and quarries. Contractors will also find this infrastructure elimination highly beneficial for the solution’s mobility, and the subscription-based aspect enables the system to be turned on and off and moved between sites with ease.

As with Modular’s other recent products, the MineCare 3 solution can deploy as a standalone application or it can integrate with Modular’s DISPATCH fleet management system (FMS) to provide even more value.