MASPRO leverages deep domain expertise to significantly prolong asset life and bolster company balance sheets in the mining sector.
A partnership with a Tier 1 mining client in WA saw MASPRO extend the life of a drill gearbox by thousands of hours, boosting its reliability and reducing the need for scheduled downtime. It did this by reverse engineering the underperforming gearbox to isolate the problem, before re-engineering it into a new solution.
This is not a singular case, with MASPRO unlocking significant productivity gains right across the Australian mining sector through its precise quality assurance (QA) processes and commitment to quality.
MASPRO head of engineering and quality Tony Waterman shared insight into the company’s QA approach.
“In-process inspection sees our staff check parts as they’re being machined to ensure tooling is behaving as expected,” Waterman told Australian Mining.
“This ensures that if we’re making 500 of something, that we don’t face an issue with tooling halfway through which wasn’t picked up prior.”
MASPRO inspects parts on a percentage basis: how often and how much of a part gets checked depends on what it is, its history, its application, and how critical the part is.
“If the part is something that’s difficult to access and replace, like a bush located inside a drill, which can only be accessed by pulling a whole drill apart, it will get a higher percentage of checks,” Waterman said.
“Our percentage of checks changes depending on the production output. If we’re consistently producing the same quality parts, we can reduce the number of checks as we can depend on the part quality being consistent.”
Waterman provided an example to back up his point.
“For pistons inside a drifter, where the pistons are getting smashed all day every day, every part will get 100 per cent checked because they are important components of the drifter and need to hold up against high stress,” he said.
“The customer can’t afford a failure, as it could lead to a breakdown and potential downtime. Completing a higher percentage of checks ensures that part is less likely to fail.
“In this instance, we would check everything at every stage of the manufacturing process, from the raw materials coming in to every heat treatment process.”
MASPRO conducts destructive testing to put the integrity of a part through its paces. This can be done on the raw materials prior to construction, on heat treatment processes, and on the final product.
This helps to ensure MASPRO can discover a problem at the earliest possible stage. Because a part can be a single component of a larger machine, problems that aren’t picked up right away can create much bigger headaches down the road.
“We treat every single part as if we’re only selling that one part,” Waterman said. “It doesn’t get skipped because it’s part of an assembly – everything gets checked the same.”
This meticulous approach to engineering is seeing MASPRO win many new clients in the Australian mining industry, where high-quality, long-lasting components can unlock millions of dollars of revenue.
MASPRO’s testing and QA processes underpin the company’s constant pursuit of quality, something Waterman believes is critical to the success of any company servicing the Australian mining industry.
“Our clients have a strict need for parts that perform,” Waterman said. “At the end of the day, everything we do is in our name, and if we make parts that fail and put our clients out, it isn’t good for the client or our brand.”
Whether it’s overhauling failing parts for drills, trucks or loaders, MASPRO can turn any mining quandary into a solution, no matter how niche it may be.
Such solutions can’t be achieved without MASPRO’s commitment to quality, highlighting the company’s unique value proposition in local and international mining sectors.
This feature will appear in the March edition of Australian Mining.