Story One · Mining

The Ninety-Centimetre Mine

From the journals of a thirty-five-year consulting career. Told first on TikTok, written up here.

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I promised I would share how to save a billion bucks, so here is the first story.

It is what I became known for on the transformation programmes I ran. I would walk in, look at the numbers, and set what the team politely called a big hairy goal. "We can take about two billion out of this business," I would say, and the room would do what rooms always do: fold its arms and tell me it never happens.

My answer was the same every time. Fine. Do not pay my bonus at the end of the three years. If it has not happened, I will walk away. And I will do it in the last twelve months.

The first time it happened was at a mining house. We were running an SAP implementation inside a much larger transformation, and to do that properly I had to go and see the mines. There were a lot of them. That is how I learned the hooter codes, two shorts and a long, and the first rule of underground survival: never put your back to a mine wall, because if the ground is going to fall, you want to see it coming. I have a whole morning's worth of mine safety stories. They can wait. Let me get to the billion.

What the data let us see

The transformation gave us something most organisations never have: a full process cost view, end to end, across a whole range of suppliers. Not a contract register. A picture of what it actually cost to get a tonne of ore from rock face to plant, with every supplier and every input laid out along the line.

Then I went underground with a cross-functional team, and I saw something.

Every blast starts with a drill pattern. The pattern determines how much explosive goes in. The explosive determines how far forward you advance, and that determines how much roof support you need, the timber packs and pillars and the roof bolts driven into the hanging wall to stop the ground coming down. Behind all of that sits a driller, underground, doing the work.

This was not gold. It was ordinary mineral, and the reef we actually wanted was narrow. But the working height was a metre, because a metre is what a person needs to get in and drill. So we were advancing a metre, supporting a metre, and blasting a metre of rock to recover a seam a fraction of that size.

So I asked the question I have asked in every industry since. Wait a minute. Are we doing this optimally?

The ninety-centimetre idea

What if we tightened the drill pattern, just slightly? A tighter pattern means lighter, cheaper explosive. Lighter explosive means you blast ninety centimetres instead of a metre. Ninety centimetres of advance needs ninety centimetres of roof support, not a metre. And a smaller, cleaner blast changes the sweeping, the work of gathering the broken ore after the blast, because you are moving less waste rock and more of what you actually want.

On paper it was a few centimetres. In practice it touched everything.

Getting there meant a large number of suppliers, buyers, quality engineers and mining engineers had to agree, test it, and prove it was viable and safe before anyone changed a single blast. The safety case had to be investigated properly. We looked hard at the roof bolts, and in the end left them as they were, because the evidence said they did not need to change.

What came out of it

Some mines on the African continent now run a smaller drill pattern, shorter roof support and lighter explosive, because of that work.

Sweeping came down by almost ten per cent. That one I expected.

Ore quality went up by close to double digits. That one surprised me. When you blast less waste, you send cleaner ore to the plant, so downstream processing improved and yield rose significantly. Add up the explosives, the timber, the sweeping, the processing and the yield across every site, and that is where the billion lives.

And here is the part I am proudest of. The suppliers won too. The people who supplied the timber for roof support had been cutting logs to a metre. Cut them to ninety centimetres and the offcuts start adding up to whole extra pieces. Their cost came down, their margin went up, and we did not have to take a cent from anyone's price to do it.

The lesson

People say procurement is about chasing paper and negotiating contracts. It is not. It is about seeing how a contract sits inside a process, and then asking whether the process itself is right.

That is a different mind frame. It is not about squeezing a price. It is about redesigning the work through data, through understanding the process end to end, through going to site, and through building one integrated cost line across all the categories in a sector instead of managing each one in its silo. When the people who own those categories work together with the same picture in front of them, the savings are not negotiated. They are designed.

The second story from the same mine

The other piece of work at that mining house did not make the same financial impact, but it had a far larger cultural one, and it did a great deal for health and safety.

A mine is a pyramid. At the top sit the highly skilled engineers. At the bottom sit people who may not have finished school and who, quite often, speak three or four languages. I have lost patience with the idea that not finishing school makes someone unintelligent. These are extremely intelligent people who know exactly what they are doing.

The proposal on the table, especially for mines operating across borders, was to teach a hundred thousand workers English.

I asked why. Why not teach four thousand highly qualified engineers to speak isiZulu and isiXhosa? They are clever people. Surely they can learn a language. Then every health and safety instruction could be given to a person in his own tongue, in his home language, which is better, safer, and a great deal cheaper.

There is a mining house that does exactly that today. I am very proud of them, and you can look it up.

That is the point. It is the human conversation, understanding how people actually interact with the process and which stakeholders are there to help you, that unlocks most of the value.

That is one story. Next up: the pharmaceutical sector.

© Madeleine Joubert / STORYC LTD (company no. 17293375), trading as AI-Augmented Consulting™ (UK TM application UK00004409146). From the professional journals; the mining house is deliberately unnamed. Privacy · All stories · storycltd.co.uk