RFID Technology in Mining
When the mining industry and miners work alongside All The Gear All The Time (ATGATT), ensuring they do this is not only important but a cumbersome task. Especially in a local mining industry where regulations are becoming tighter and the industry as a whole is growing at mass scale. With this, streamlined compliance with safety regulations and the management of Personal Protective Equipment is of utmost importance.
Every mine should stipulate the protective personal equipment required for that mine and specific activity to be performed and ensure that workers abide by these stipulations. With this, every mining operation should be able to answer the following questions, with precise accuracy:
- Who the garments or items were issued to and were the items returned?
- Were the items sent to the laundry and were they then received from the laundry?
- Do all workers have the correct PPE as required by their role prior to entry to the mine?
- The last location of PPE stock including torches, breathing equipment, blasting equipment?
Should these questions render negative answers and lead you and your team to labourously go through items and perform labour-intensive manuals tasks like separating and counting, then it’s time to implement the Inteltag Uniform System.
This Uniform system eliminates hours of labour-intensive manual tasks like separating and counting uniforms by hand and automates record-keeping, which eliminates manual errors. This automation provides:
- Real-time information for ongoing cost-saving benefits and reduces labour costs
- Improves labour efficiency and reduces purchases
- Saves Money – managed stock means lower cost
- Manages employee uniforms and eliminates theft
- Establishes accountability and establishes a perpetual uniform inventory
- Tracks garment and PPE stock activity
- Forecasts uniform purchases and provide critical information
With large mines requiring automated processes to generate reliable and real-time management information for large volumes of employees per shift, RFID is pivotal.
We’re currently in discussions with mining companies who boast 1000s of workers and 1000s of garments. With this, we know that each mining staff complement is different, and have seen the effects of 2000 minors waiting for their clean overhauls and what this can do to daily mining operations.
We’ve also seen the negative effects that occur when mining companies are not able to track miners entering and exiting the mine and those left scrambling to find those who did not exit the mines.
And with mining operations rapidly expanding in the country, no one currently in South Africa is able to prevent all of the latter at such an expanding scale. According to online news sources, “South Africa, home to the world’s biggest deposits of a number of minerals, has set an annual target of attracting $900-million of mining exploration expenditure annually by 2025.” It is now that RFID technology in mining needs to be introduced to all mining operations.
Solutions for the Mining Industry
IntelTag RFID Solutions are optimisable and may be synchronized with various interfaces. Specialised reports are generated and authorised employees and miners can log onto the system in real-time to access records or reports.
Our system also generates important reports like:
- Miner’s Log: Real-time status and movement of personnel
- Exception Reports: This generates a log of alarms with time, date, and locations where miners attempted to enter a restricted location or enter and exit certain areas with or without the relevant PPE items.
- PPE Register: A report that generates the date, time and location of where PPE items have been added or removed. This report is also capable of tracking PPE items that are faulty or have been sent in for refurbishment or repair.
- Automated tracking and tracing of miners and PPE items.
These are our solutions for mining companies and miners, so enlist RFID specialist Inteltag to develop a technological solution specific to the requirements of your mining company within the mining industry. From actual miners and mining companies to suppliers of mining garments requiring tracking from the manufacturing level, we know what RFID technology and its systems are capable of and we’re ready to bring it to the mining industry.
