Developed by BHP’s maintenance and technology teams, in partnership with some of the worlds’ largest heavy equipment manufacturers, Dash Maintainer Tools allows front line personnel to securely collect data from machinery remotely, avoiding the potential risks associated with manually checking dials or taking readings from heavy mobile equipment such as trucks, excavators, drills and ‘dozers.

BHP has one of the largest fleet of heavy mining vehicles in the world. The women and men working on the tools on their mobile mining equipment alone represent approximately one-third of the front-line workforce in their mining operations.

While many maintenance tasks are undertaken with equipment powered down, equipment still needs to be powered on to diagnose faults and undertake tests for inspections, we call this ’live work’ (e.g. an excavator needs to be running in order to test the hydraulic system). This work is some of the highest risk work in our industry and contributes to our potential fatality consequence material risks across mining operations globally. On excavators alone, we have identified over 130 ‘live work’ maintenance tasks where our people are exposed to the line of fire.

Risks associated with ‘live work’ are managed by a number of controls including administrative processes, safe work procedures, and through the use of personal protective equipment. While these practices can minimise the risk to the work, BHP’s Western Australia Iron Ore South Flank Operations team set out to remove these risks altogether. This goal has led to the development of Dash Maintainer Tools which effectively eliminates almost all of the risks associated with live maintenance work.

Dash Maintainer Tools, is an Industry 4.0 system, that allows maintenance workers to undertake the majority of the diagnostic tests from a distance of up to 100 metres away from the machine, simply by connecting their phone, laptop or tablet to the mining vehicle or equipment. To achieve this, Dash Maintainer Tools uses both the existing sensors on the machine, and an extendable network of sensors permanently fitted to relevant vehicles or equipment that are able to measure pressure, temperature, vibration and many other factors. Data collected from the sensors is then sent to an industrial computer and the BHP-developed sensor gateway and are fed back to the team. 

Dash Maintainer Tools is changing how BHP approaches maintenance works in a number of ways. The deployment of Dash Maintainer Tools has helped to increase productivity by reducing the time to diagnose faults and shortening the service times, which in turn enables the machinery to get back to work faster.  Beyond promoting overall safety and making a high-risk job easier for frontline staff, Dash Maintainer Tools makes maintenance work more accessible for people with different abilities. 

The Dash Maintainer Tools have been designed to scale and replicate and the team is now looking to roll out this way of working more broadly. The team are working with the industries largest original equipment manufacturers to integrate this capability on equipment across the globe.