"LCS teams use a holistic approach to drive a step change in equipment availability"

Services that address equipment uptime, maintenance and labor costs, productivity, safety and financing are becoming more and more important to global miners. Leveraging partners for additional expertise and services can allow mines to better allocate their resources to core business activities. One way to do this is through long term service contracts such as a Metso Life Cycle Services (LCS) agreement.

"Today we have roughly 300 LCS contracts globally," says Giuseppe Campanelli, Vice President Professional Services at Metso. "Over the last several years our customers are looking to these types of agreements to help them meet their business objectives."

A 69% reduction in downtime for Primary Gyratory Crushers

In 2010, Anglo American's Los Bronces mine in Chile had a target to achieve higher availability and efficiency for their primary crushing plant without compromising safety. As part of their optimization efforts, the mine signed a Metso LCS maintenance contract aimed at achieving optimal equipment availability, which has grown to include the Metso Primary Gyratory Crushers, belts, chutes, hoppers and additional equipment.

Thanks to the LCS contract, Los Bronces reduced downtime of its primary crushing plant by 69% in 2016, with Metso servicing the entire primary crushing process using innovative technology. With zero safety incidents for the project, Los Bronces awarded Metso the "Commitment to Zero Harm and Living the Anglo American Way 2017".

"We shift the paradigm of these types of contracts. From the idea of simply maintaining maintenance time to considerably reducing it", added Guillermo Foncea, Metso Contract Administrator for Los Bronces.

For more details on what was achieved, see Los Bronces in Metso Showroom.

Making the big difference for their customers

Decades of experience in mining processes allows Metso to deliver equipment designed to meet production goals. A full range of services including spares, wear parts, field and engineered services, as well as process optimization teams allow customers to get even more out of their producing assets.

LCS solutions bundles Metso's entire range of services into customizable packages, with payment schemes aligned with the customer's cash flows and performance measured against key metrics. Metso uses in-depth equipment knowledge from its OEM expertise, work practices optimized over hundreds of cycles and experience from similar mine sites to ensure results. The aim is to maximize equipment uptime, ensure the highest end-product quality and secure continuous production.

The award-winning case, Los Bronces, with its 69% improvement in downtime is a good example of how Metso is making the big difference for their customers. Instead of looking at individual parts of a shutdown process, LCS teams use a holistic approach
 to drive a step change in equipment availability. This includes preplanning, tooling, labor resources, maintenance, inventory management, reliability engineering, execution and post mortem analysis.

For more details on LCS, see Metso Life Cycle Services.