Owing to the flourishing mining industry in West Africa and the significant increase in demand for training programmes in the region, mining software and simulation company CAE Mining is undertaking a feasibility study on the viability of establishing a local presence for sales and support in the region.

“CAE Mining hopes to complete this feasibility study by the end of this year. This study is the result of an increasing number of requests the company received in the past five years from West African countries, such as Ghana and Mali, to offer operator and professional services training,” CAE Mining marketing and strategy director Dylan Webb tells Mining Weekly.

CAE Mining has been operating in Africa since the 1980s, specifically in the geology and mining engineering sectors. In the last two years, the company started developing training software and simulator technologies for the mining industry, which have been adapted from CAE’s civil aviation and military division.

CAE Mining’s technologies and services are distributed in Africa through its office in Johannesburg, South Africa.
In September 2012, the company launched its CAE Terra underground simulator at MINExpo, in Las Vegas, in the US. The simulator has a 270° wraparound screen and six-degrees-of-freedom motion system.

“The uptake of the system has been good to date, with the first of the systems delivered in May to a mine in Central America,” says Webb.

“The CAE Terra simulator incorporates the rock properties as part of the simulation, so that the mine in which the trainee will work can be simulated, including how the drill will function in those specific conditions,” he explains.

Webb says that the realistic simulation greatly assists in training, as trainees are exposed to the dangers of underground operations in a real-life manner in preparation for their actual work underground. Companies can train their workers to become competent drillers without interrupting the operations, as the trainees no longer have to be trained on a drill during an active mining operation, thus reducing downtime and increasing operational productivity.

“Entry-level training on the simulator takes about one week to complete, with even less time required for experienced mine operators,” he states.

The simulator was also exhibited at the African Mining Indaba trade show, in Cape Town, earlier this year. Although the actual system was not taken to the Indaba, pictures and brochures of the product were distributed.

The company plans to officially launch the machine in Africa later this year, but is yet to decide whether it will exhibit the machine at a trade show or at a customer’s mine site, says Webb.

He explains that the company has been able to decrease the chances of trainees suffering from motion sickness while using the simulator by coordinating the simulator’s motions and visuals, which the company has adapted from its aviation simulation division.

The company regularly runs training pro- grammes at mine sites. These training pro- grammes include training in geology, production, engineering, systems and processes, as well as mine planning.

Webb says the company is usually contracted to run training courses when issues regarding inefficiencies in productivity arise.

The company then trains mine operators to use the equipment more efficiently, which entails getting the correct amount of swing time on a shovel, getting the right amount of passes on a loader truck and the best way of getting into broken rock, as well as reducing cycle times and increasing general mine productivity, he explains.

CAE Mining also offers training at new mines, where there is a need to train many entry-level workers in a short time, along with on-demand training programmes and scheduled training programmes.

Further, CAE Mining has also noted an increased demand for workers to attend scheduled training courses. One of the reasons for this, Webb notes, is that mines have limited budgets to send workers for training.

“Instead of having a whole team trained on site, the mining companies are opting to have one member undergo extensive training, after which this member can transfer what he or she has learnt to the rest of the member’s colleagues,” he comments.

Moreover, Webb says companies believe in the benefit of sending their workers to the scheduled training courses, as these courses comprise mixed groups of workers from different mining operations and they gain important knowledge concerning the best practices of other mining operations.

He says that CAE Mining’s research has found that its training programmes improve productivity by at least 5%, which can translate into millions of dollars of additional profits.