Lean tools selection for mining : an occupational health and safety approach

Abstract

The implementation of lean principles is a well-known subject in the manufacturing industries. There are several publications regarding the impact of this implementation on productivity and workers’ occupational health and safety (OHS) in this sector. In mining industries, however, the link between lean integration and OHS is missing and the publications regarding this issue are scarce. In this thesis, an attempt was made to address this issue and investigate more about lean mining in Canada. For that purpose, a literature review followed by an expert elicitation study were conducted. The main objectives of this thesis were to find out about the proper lean tools to be implemented in the mining industry and to investigate about their links with an important productivity indicator (i.e. daily advance rate) and OHS indicators (i.e. body reaction and struck by an object) in the Canadian underground gold mining. Based on the results of this thesis, a lean mining lifecycle framework with four different phases and a set of lean tools (i.e. VSM, 5S, Kaïzen, TPM, SMED and LIC) were proposed for the mining sector. Furthermore, according to the expert elicitation (7 Canadian experts), 5S and TPM could have positive impacts on daily advance rate and kaïzen could potentially enhance the miners’ safety by reducing the rate of struck by an object risks at their workplace. A lean mining preliminary road-map was proposed based on these findings. This study’s results can be used as a stepping stone in future studies to gain a better understanding about lean mining integrating OHS issues in Canada.

Date	26 Jun 2019
Original language	American English
Awarding Institution	École de technologie supérieure
Supervisor	Sylvie Nadeau (Supervisor) & Barthélemy Ateme-Nguema (Co-supervisor)