Business
We're taking you to the other side of the world today as you'll notice this episode is in Spanish, to chat to a man with over 40 years experience working in the mining maintenance industry. Julio Sotella started his career from the workshop floor and then grew into leadership roles. He has worked in mobile mining equipment and also fixed plant maintenance. He has a very practical understanding of equipment reliability and knows how to achieve it. Our host, Gerard Wood met Julio when he was the mobile maintenance manager for Spence mine in Chile. Julio setup the Spence mine from scratch as a greenfield project and he developed a team and workshop that had the best culture around oil and fluids cleanliness of any mine in BHP at that stage. It was the only mine in BHP to receive Caterpillar 5 Star oil cleanliness accreditation. Gerard was the Global Practice Leader for Maintenance in BHP Base Metals at the time and Spence was one of the mines in this part of BHP. On the podcast today, Julio emphasises the importance of keeping your workplace and equipment clean, and the positive outcomes this will achieve in machinery reliability. In his younger years working in an Iron Ore mine with his father, Julio noticed how dirty everything was, and when questioning his father about this, it was made apparent that the work culture at that time was that the dirtier the job site, the better the job performance. Julio did his research looking at automotive industries in other parts of the world, and came to realise that the reverse was in fact true. A clean job site, made it possible to achieve better reliability outcomes among many other benefits. We’re sure that you will take plenty of learnings from this conversation and this will give you the knowledge to employ the insights learned here in your organizations to get more from your assets. For more resources and information, head to the Bluefield Asset Management website. To learn more about getting the most out of your assets, grab a copy of Gerard’s book Simplifying Mining Maintenance.