ICL Boulby

Every employee ‘old or new’ receives White Belt, then those in a leadership role will gain Yellow Belt and progress to Green Belt.

Some of the projects delivered by the Green Belts are below: 

1. Reducing downtime on Mining machines – using LSS to collect data to understand mining machine with most down time, and then analyse the reason why, prioritise and resolve

2. Maintenance resource utilisation – analysing data to understand how and what the maintenance staff where spending most of their time on. Giving focus on what to remedy first Implement robust WiFi underground to aid tracking and accountability of mining staff whilst underground. In addition, this has also allowed hand held tablets (iPads) to be used to make day to day operations more efficient)

3. Bring Polyhalite / Polysulphate ‘fractions’ back into spec (Quality Improvements) – ICL Boulby has 6 different product type’s. Identify biggest concern and utilise effort to bring back into spec. Using lessons learnt on remains product type that may go out of spec.

4. Improve screening methods – Inline with the above, an additional project was required to improve the screening in the process plant resulting in more control over screen types / size as well as improving the existing quality of the screen used.

5. Investigate the life cycle and change over methods of the tips used on the mining picks (part of the mining machine) – this also highlighted a further project relating to the drum attached to the mining machine. All of which would increase efficiency of the mining machines.