The greenfield Houndé gold operation in Burkina Faso has recently gone into development, with fast timelines to get equipment to site and operators trained. Endeavour Mining has selected operator training solutions from Immersive Technologies to assist in this.
Jeremy Langford, EVP – Project and Technical Services Group at Endeavour Mining, commented: “In the short time the site has been operational, the simulator training programme has already produced significant improvement in operator behaviours, resulting in a reduction of unscheduled maintenance, including tyre, shifting and transmission abuse, as well as improvements in spotting times and incorrect brake application.
“Over time we plan to provide training in the simulators for people of the local community not employed by HGO. Our first priority is to train the personnel selected for operational positions. This is quite a lengthy process.”
Operators are trained on specific behaviours that impact machine health, safety and productivity, and management is able to identify which operators require additional training.
“In our baseline evaluation, we noted a common problem where many operators were using a gear too high for the grade thereby impacting transmission performance. After training was conducted, operators later returned to one of the two simulators for a re-measure, and we found the training had resulted in an 85% decrease in improper gear selection,” said Anthony Bruce, regional vice-president, Africa, Europe and CIS, Immersive Technologies.
The site reported the following results:
- 80% reduction in tyre abuse errors;
- 67.7% reduction in incorrect brake application;
- 41.5% reduction in engine damage;
- 11 second improvement in spot time;
- 6.44 second reduction in average loading reversing time; and
- 1.57 minute improvement in average circuit time.
Endeavour is utilising two simulators from Immersive Technologies with multiple simulator modules and is the first mine using this level of technology in Burkina Faso.
