Adopting a value mindset to drive productivity in Mining and Metallurgy

Adopting a Value
Mindset to Drive
Productivity in Mining
and Metallurgy
Tackling the Value Imperative
Head-On with Insight and Pragmatism
Sustaining Capital & Consulting Services – Mining & Metallurgy

SNC-Lavalin Mining & Metallurgy – Sustaining Capital & Consulting Services
Adopting a Value Mindset To Drive Productivity in Mining and Metallurgy 2
Contents
The Value Mindset in Mining and Metallurgy 3-4
Developing a Holistic View onto Asset Portfolios and Operations 5
Being Adaptable While Staying True to the Guiding Stars of Value 6
Driving Scalability – Zoning in to Generate Value Quickly 7
Case Study: How Technical Experience and Applied Analytics Helped a Gold Mine Boost Performance 8
Building on Demonstrated Results to Develop a Value Mindset 9
Executive Summary 10
SNC-Lavalin’s Sustaining Capital & Consulting Services Practice 11
Contacts Back

SNC-Lavalin Mining & Metallurgy – Sustaining Capital & Consulting
Services
Adopting a Value Mindset To Drive Productivity in Mining and
Metallurgy 3
The Value
Mindset in Mining
and Metallurgy
Overcoming market pressures to
achieve performance with speed,
agility and scalability.
In today’s market, where commodities are
not only volatile but hitting record lows,
mining and metallurgy companies are
postponing growth capital and are focusing
on getting more out of their existing assets.
These are rigorously managed as owners
are looking at ways to reduce their costs and
drive productivity within their existing capital
portfolio.
With easy savings already harvested in most operations,
owners are looking for incremental improvements – more
difficult to identify and capture. Trade-offs are made on
existing assets, either sacrificing their lifespan for greater
productivity or vice versa. The pressure coming from
investors and stakeholders combined with daily operational
challenges is making it harder than ever to ensure that the
right decisions are being made to favor both short term
efficiency and long term growth.

Honing in on Productivity Amid Growing Pressures
While operations grow bigger and more complex, knowing where and how to act to promote productivity in an
environment with intense scrutiny on spending is challenging. Mining and metallurgy companies don’t have the luxury
of time to be certain in identifying the best improvements before then attempting to implement them. Many end up
skipping the step of considering their integrated portfolio and operations before jumping to specific areas they hope
will yield the best returns. In doing so, they could end up missing significant opportunities that would have been faster
and easier to put in place.
Those that are successful in quickly zoning in on the most impactful productivity plays have an in-depth
understanding of their end-to-end operations value chain as well as their overall asset portfolio. They are adaptable
and quickly able to pinpoint where and how to act to realize value. They promote continuous improvement based on
consistently demonstrating the Return on Investment (ROI) and Return on Assets (ROA) of each initiative
undertaken, building on the value they deliver as they go.
But how to generate productivity quickly and pragmatically?
Developing a Holistic View onto Your Asset Portfolios and
Operations
An end-to-end understanding of the operations value
chain of a project is required before zoning in on
certain areas to drive productivity improvements.
Similarly, an in-depth grasp of your asset portfolio and
how each asset contributes to your overall strategy is
a must to best optimize and manage. Developing this
holistic view doesn’t need to be an overly lengthy
exercise. More and more, mining and metallurgy
companies are able to quickly assess and map out
the relationships and value contributions of each
element of their value chain and global portfolio. This
avoids siloed analyses that can severely limit the
value creation potential of improvement initiatives.

By taking action prior to understanding the big picture,
the integrated nature of operational and strategic
management challenges can be overlooked, resulting
in missing the key enablers to step-change
improvements. For instance, when trying to optimize
bottleneck activities, operational value chain
assessments can capture up to 15% more
productivity gains by taking into account
consequential impacts of up and downstream
processes in addition to the bottlenecks.
“...when trying to optimize bottleneck activities, operational value chain assessments can
capture up to 15% more productivity gains by taking into account consequential impacts of up
and downstream processes in addition to the bottlenecks.”
To be able to quickly make sense of all layers of your business, from overall strategy through to engineering
procedures at one particular site, mining and metallurgy executives are relying on applied analytics infused with
performance accelerators and deep technical expertise. This allows for the data-driven solutions of applied analytics
to be quickly tailored to the engineering and construction realities of mining and metallurgy companies.

Being Adaptable While Staying True to the Guiding Stars of Value
With the rate of change in today’s commodity
markets, adaptability is primordial to quickly respond
to the evolving marketplace and demands of delivery
milestones. While the value levers are limited, the
improvement options are nearly infinite: scale
operations up and down profitably while managing
risks, driving process efficiencies from daily
operations, investing in asset reliability, managing
cost leakages, etc. The best route to take needs to be
chartered according to a cohesive strategy that
articulates the guiding stars of value, those end-goal
objectives that determine whether your business is
performing on track. Staying the course to deliver
objectives while being flexible in defining the best
route to realize them requires the ability to understand
the implications involved in each decision trade-off
and the real-time value realization of improvement
activities.
Often value-driving initiatives are undertaken to drive
improvements in key indicators at the expense of
others down the value chain; by understanding how
decisions impact all your key performance metrics,
you can make better decisions on which initiatives to
pursue.

Driving Scalability – Zoning in to Generate Value Quickly
Once value driving initiatives are identified, acting on
those that are fast to achieve performance targets
allows you to test out and refine an understanding of
your value chain and portfolio. With first wins, you can
then step-correct your approach and tackle even
greater value generating initiatives, scaling as you go.
To obtain those quick wins and drive efficient and
effective value play initiatives, an in-depth
understanding of technical realities is required to best
interpret data-driven insights and define the best
initiatives to implement. Performance accelerators,
such as benchmark repositories and value realization
frameworks, facilitate the rapid deployment of these
initiatives and ensure that they yield the value
targeted. Without real-world technical expertise and
performance accelerators, analytics empowered
insights will fall short of delivering desired results.
It is the combination of applied analytics, technical
expertise and a value-focus enabled by performance
accelerators that can quickly unlock hidden value
from existing capital assets and projects.

How Real-world Technical Expertise Combined with Applied
Analytics Helped a Gold Mine to Boost Performance
› The issue – Based on an additional exploration program, an active open-pit heap-leach gold mine operation was
preparing to expand significantly. At the same time, this mine was looking to revitalize its existing operation to
significantly increase throughput and overall gold recovery.
› The solution - Taking an end-to-end view on operations through the lens of applied analytics enabled the mine to
increase ore processing capacity by a factor of 5, grow recovery by as much as 20%, and reprocess existing heap
leach stockpiles with a more current technology. This project is also expected to extend the life of mine by 10
years.
› The approach - The new exploration campaign information and the existing mine’s operational data, including the
unstructured and unused, were reviewed and analyzed. The resulting insights informed targeted site reviews and
quickly pointed to higher than desired ore being lost in heap leaching residue. New optimized processing technology
was confirmed and modeling conducted to unlock the mine’s new performance levels. Key steps undertaken were:
› Conducted comparative studies and ran ‘what-if’ scenarios to determine the optimal mine production schedule and the
optimal process plant design for the specific ore body, based on results of metallurgical testing taking into account the wide
range of ore properties;
› Modeled social and environmental impacts;
› Designed the processing plant and major infrastructure (tailings storage facility, ore haulage roads, dump facilities, river
diversion and bridge) based on the optimal scenario;
› Estimated the CAPEX and OPEX for the optimal scenario at a bankable pre-feasibility level;
› Combined deep expertise from process plant design, mining, geotechnical and hydro-geological engineering, mining
environment and project planning using analytics technology to define the most effective solution for variable ore body and
heap leaching residue reprocessing.

Building on Demonstrated Results
to Develop a Value Mindset, a
Constant Engine Moving Your
Portfolio Forward
Value campaigns are often initiated but rarely
maintained without massive and continuous
investment. While the intent is for these programs to
continue well beyond the first few initiatives and
become part of the organizational fabric, a lack of
employee buy-in to the changes required can put a
halt to improvement initiatives realizing targeted
benefits.
With today’s intuitive analytics solutions and tools,
campaigns have a much higher rate of success as
employees at all levels can be involved in, not only
implementing initiatives, but identifying them as well.
By empowering your existing talent to understand
vectors of change and even leveraging natural
competition between teams through gamification, new
tools and technologies can drive collaboration and
make your productivity campaign a self-fuelled
success.
Far from being limited only to the ivory tower of mine
management, applied analytics solutions, supported
by visualization tools, can promote continual usage at
all levels and contribute to the type of ongoing
collaboration required for true innovation in
productivity.

Executive Summary
As mining and metallurgy companies focus on driving productivity and overall returns
out of existing assets, rapidity, adaptability and scalability in execution are essential in
today’s volatile environment. The most performant are equipping themselves with the
capabilities and tools to rapidly zone in on the most impactful areas to optimise across
portfolios and end-to-end operations, flexibly adjusting as market demands change and
scaling quickly towards continuous improvement and optimal performance.
1. Developing a Holistic View onto Asset
Portfolios and Operations
Understanding value levers across portfolios and
end-to-end operations is required to hone in on
those areas that will yield the most returns.
To gain these insights quickly, mining and
metallurgy companies are turning to applied
analytics infused with performance accelerators
and deep technical knowledge and expertise.
2. Being Adaptable while staying true to the
Guiding Stars of Value
As market conditions evolve, it is important to
put in place systems and tools that provide an
updated view onto the performance and health
of portfolio and operations to allow for
adjustments in line with overall strategies.
3. Driving Scalability – Zoning in to Generate
Value Quickly
With intense scrutiny on spending that isn’t
strictly required to keep operations moving,
decisions on where to invest need to be oriented
towards rapid value realization.
An in-depth understanding of technical realities
is required to best interpret data-driven insights
and define the best initiatives to implement,
while performance accelerators add a value-lens
and facilitate rapid deployment. Once quick wins
are established, it is important to maintain the
momentum towards continuous improvement.
4. Building on Demonstrated Results to
Develop a Value Mindset, a Constant Engine
Moving Your Portfolio Forward
An ‘all hands on deck’ approach ensures buy-in
and commitment to realizing the changes
intended. By including all levels of your
organization from the C-Suite to the shop floor
in, not only executing improvement programs,
but also identifying the best sources of
improvement, follow-through on initiatives is
much higher. Empowering your workforce to
understand and drive value contributes not only
to a higher rate of adoption but also enhances
the pipeline of strong ideas for value creation.
With the democratization of analytics tools, it is
now easier to empower your people with the
value mindset, harnessing insights towards
greater productivity and performance.

Developing a Value Mindset Towards Productivity in Mining 11
About SNC-Lavalin
Founded in 1911, SNC-Lavalin is one of the leading engineering and construction groups in the world and a major player in the
ownership of infrastructure. From offices in over 50 countries, SNC-Lavalin’s employees provide EPC and EPCM services to
clients in a variety of industry sectors, including mining and metallurgy, oil and gas, environment and water, infrastructure and
clean power. SNC-Lavalin can also combine these services with its financing and operations and maintenance capabilities to
provide complete end-to-end project solutions. snclavalin.com
Our Mining & Metallurgy team combines global-caliber expertise with deep local capabilities to provide tailored solutions for
projects of any size, scope or complexity in the aluminium, gold, copper, iron ore, nickel, fertilizers and sulphur product sectors,
among others. snclavalin.com/en/mining-metallurgy
©2016 SNC-Lavalin Inc.
All Rights Reserved.
SCCS no. 0001
How SNC-Lavalin’s Sustaining Capital & Consulting Services
Practice Can Help Your Mining and Metallurgy Business
With the pressures and constraints that come with operating in today’s mining and metallurgy environment,
companies are focusing on optimizing their existing capital to drive operational productivity as well as capital
efficiency. Mining and metallurgy companies are engaged in a constant balancing act of demonstrating top
performance to investors while maintaining their social licence to operate with key stakeholders and fine-tuning
workforce needs through the ups and downs of asset lifecycles.
SNC-Lavalin’s Sustaining Capital & Consulting Services (SC&CS) helps mining and metallurgy companies attain
higher value creation targets across their end-to-end operations and global portfolios. We deliver results by bringing
together our deep engineering and construction technical expertise with our value oriented consulting approach and
experience.
Our network of skilled advisors and experts empower their clients to make the best decisions at every level of
management across the following services:
› Portfolio Management
Holistic portfolio review to optimize assets
› Applied Analytics
Harvesting, via analytics, modeling, scheduling and
simulations, the right data to drive the right decisions and
promote the right behavior
› Capability Assessments and Benchmarking
Rapid reviews of portfolio and operations as compared to
industry standards and leading practices
› Technical Due Diligence
Review of portfolio and operations
› Operational Readiness
Accelerating gears towards full capacity
› Operational and Asset Excellence
Acting on insight at every level and across operations, from
process optimization to asset lifecycle management
› Process Control and Automation
Driving more rigor and efficiency from engineering processes
› Mine and Plant Services
Supporting day-to-day engineering and construction activities
› Mining Environment
Water, air and waste management, mine reclamation and
general health and safety

To find out more
Contact our Team in Sustaining
Capital & Consulting Services
Harvey Wilson
+1 480 521 6146
harvey.wilson@snclavalin.com
Alex Dassa
+ 1 514 825 8345
alexandra.dassa@snclavalin.com
Benoit Valiquette
+ 1 514 947 7594
benoit.valiquette@snclavalin.com
Nathalie Viens
Vice-President, Global Sustaining Capital and Consulting Services
+1 514 984 8721
nathalie.viens@snclavalin.com

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