Success Story:
Rio Tinto — Kennecott Utah Copper
Achieved 1,500% ROI by utilizing GPS Insight
Company:
Kennecott Utah Copper
Industry:
Mining
Location:
Salt Lake City, UT
Website:
www.riotinto.com
“We have saved over one million dollars in fuel costs alone in the last 12 months, and have saved thousands of dollars in other projects using the GPS Insight toolset.“
Kenny Harvey
Mobile Maintenance, Planner Kennecott Utah Copper
Highlights
Saved one million dollars in fuel costs
Saved thousands of dollars in additional projects
Company
Kennecott Utah Copper is the site of the largest copper mine in the world.
Challenge
Kennecott Utah Copper’s (KUC) operation is unique in that its vehicles don’t traverse great distances but are spread out across a 25 mile stretch of land, which made it difficult to manage their large fleet of vehicles.
The most significant issue they were having in monitoring and policing their idle activity. Equipment would be left idling for hours on end, and managers knew they were producing large amounts of Green House Gas (GHG) as a result.
The excessive idling was also leading to warranty issues. Kenny Harvey added, “As our equipment idled we lost valuable warranty coverage due to the fact that the manufacturers of our light and heavy equipment were basing warranty coverage off of hours run, not miles driven.” Equipment utilization was also an issue. They needed to find a way to track equipment utilization in order to improve efficiency and vehicle availability by right-sizing their fleet.
These issues needed to be addressed to ensure vehicles were operating efficiently throughout and completing their contractual or operational lifecycle.
Solution
KUC implemented GPS Insight in late 2008 when it began to monitor idle time and GHG emissions on 28 trucks. Since that time, the GPS Insight solution has enabled KUC to far exceed their original expectations.
They have now implemented multiple programs and business improvement projects as a result of, and through the use of, the GPS Insight data. They are currently monitoring over 400 trucks, and are using GPS Insight to keep track of preventative maintenance intervals, ensure proper routing of service vehicles, increase fuel savings focusing, reduce GHG emissions, and also monitor fleet utilization and availability. Kenny Harvey stated, “We have saved over one million dollars in fuel costs alone in the last 12 months, and have saved thousands of dollars in other projects using the GPS Insight toolset.”
Kennecott Copper Utah knows very well that there are significant benefits to using the GPS Insight product. It is not trivial to extract all the ROI which is possible, but with its rich feature set, “mining” ROI from their investment in GPS Insight has proven to be extremely valuable.
