Kinross Russia was one of the first sites to implement the new ‘Achieving Excellence’ program this past spring and summer. The entire region has been working to align operations and optimize efficiency.
During the 12 weeks of phase one, the region worked to communicate the new program to each employee through town halls, quizzes, workshops and posters. The region also just completed the diagnostic phase where teams developed detailed plans of all the potential areas to reduce costs and improve operations.
Russia anticipates that Achieving Excellence will bring significant operational efficiency improvements, resulting in lower production cost of sales. Russia also has its own Value Innovation program to develop employees’ critical thinking. They are combining their efforts for that program with Achieving Excellence for optimal results.
“Achieving Excellence, along with our own Value Innovation, increases opportunities for teams to come up with new ideas enabling evaluation of our processes so we can work even more efficiently and safer than before,” said Claude Schimper, Regional Vice-President, Russia.
Russia is focused on how their two mines can work better together through these initiatives:
- Ore transportation: cross-site teams looking for ways to cut travel time of ore trucks to increase the number of trips from three per day to four to increase ore haulage capacity
- The “one mine project” which looks at ways to optimize Kupol and Dvoinoye production as a whole
- Studying a combination of different initiatives and mine simulations to better understand equipment interactions to increase production and improve overall operations
- Looking at inventory from a more regional perspective, instead of being site oriented
- Implementing business improvement management software to facilitate easier collaboration and communication between sites and departments
“Our ultimate goal is to combine all our efforts and together achieve significant improvements across the whole value chain, leveraging on synergies and close collaboration among the production and administrative sites, basing our initiatives on principles of responsible mining, safety, and sustainable growth,” said Helisangela Mendonca, Regional Project Coordinator, Continuous Improvement.
One of the new posters
The Achieving Excellence kickoff event at the gym in Kupol
A workshop in action
Talking ‘Achieving Excellence’ at the employee café
