For Australian mining company BHP, productivity and safety are essential goals, and they go hand in hand. During COVID-19, when safety restrictions required limiting staff at mining sites, BHP turned to Microsoft HoloLens 2 and Dynamics 365 Remote Assist as a way to deliver support and training to field workers from thousands of miles away or even around the globe. Employees have found the technologies to be intuitive and helpful, and BHP anticipates even more use cases for HoloLens 2 and Remote Assist after the COVID-19 crisis has passed.
The Pilbara is a remote and ancient landscape in the north of Western Australia; this is red dirt country.
Andrew Wood is a mechanical fitter with 30 years’ experience under his belt. He works for BHP’s iron ore team in Western Australia’s Pilbara. A frontline operator with many years of experience, he uses his expertise to design new tools to help keep his peers out of harm’s way. Each day he pulls on the hi-vis and checks his tools of choice—a pressure gauge, a hammer, and these days, a Microsoft HoloLens 2 device.
Workplace restrictions designed to keep people safe from COVID-19 mean that BHP hasn’t been able to fly people to and from its mine sites as freely as it did in the past—but it still needs equipment inspected, serviced, and maintained. Equipping people like Woody with mixed reality means expertise can still be delivered where it’s needed, when it’s needed.
By using HoloLens 2—a head mounted computer with a see-through display—Woody can coach his peers at site, anytime, from anywhere using Microsoft Dynamics 365 Remote Assist. Woody is instantly able to see what mechanical fitters at site can see, send them helpful documentation, videos, and schematics on the fly, and even use digital ink and arrows to annotate real things in the physical world in order to help them complete tasks and inspections on remote sites.
For Alex Bertram, Digital Products Manager at BHP, the rollout of the technology was accelerated by BHP’s ability to innovate during the COVID-19 crisis, with strong support from its relationship with Microsoft.
Safety, speed and smarts
Using mixed reality in its day-to-day operations is one of a series of innovations that BHP is undertaking to keep its people safe and its productivity up.
Dash Maintainer Tools, developed by BHP’s maintenance and innovation teams, allow frontline personnel to securely collect data from machinery remotely, avoiding the potential risks associated with manually checking dials or taking readings from heavy mobile equipment such as trucks, excavators, drills, and bulldozers.
Leveraging IoT sensors and industrial computers connected to Microsoft Azure, the Dash solution gets data into the hands of maintenance technicians on their smartphone or tablet.
Productivity and safety go hand in hand and are guiding lights for BHP and its innovation efforts. This focus enabled the team to have the first version of Dash in the field on a 400-ton excavator within 16 weeks of it being an idea on a white board.
To keep its people, families, and communities safe during the COVID-19 pandemic, BHP introduced many rigorous measures and controls to reduce the risk of transmission.
This has included limiting numbers at its mine sites to only those required to enable safe operations; anyone who can work from home has done so.
At first, it meant that Alex couldn’t get his team to South Flank to keep developing the Dash tool at the same velocity. Nor could many other experts who would typically be flown to a mine to set up new equipment, solve a problem, or conduct an inspection.
Even so, “Our people on the front line are empowered to try new things to safely get on with the job,” says Alex.
“During COVID-19, I expected the pace of innovation to slow, but we’ve seen the opposite. People really rally together and are open to trying new things to safely get the job done,” says Alex.
He’d already witnessed the potential of HoloLens and mixed reality and was convinced that in combination with Dynamics 365 Remote Assist it would allow expertise to be delivered virtually to the teams still working at BHP’s Pilbara operations to support continued development of the Dash Maintainer Tools.
“Given many of us were working from home due to COVID-19, the first device was delivered to my house to test and by the following week, we’d undertaken trials in our workshop environment in Perth,” says Alex. The team were able to test the system on real machinery at BHP’s Innovation Centre Lab, located at the Perth Repair Centre, which provides a safe and controlled environment to trial new technologies and ways of working on mining equipment.
“The following week, we ran a dry run and test at the mine, and five or six days later we supported the installation of the first prototype of Dash Maintainer Tools on a 300-ton haul truck. A process like that would normally take a few months at least.”
In fact, it took less than four weeks from the HoloLens 2 device arriving at Alex’s Perth home to it being used to install the first prototype of the Dash tool on a Komatsu dump truck in the heart of the Pilbara.
Intuitive solution
Andrew Wood was on the ground for the initial test of the HoloLens 2 device at the Innovation Centre Lab. He’s a highly experienced mechanical fitter with decades of experience in the Pilbara and Queensland’s Bowen Basin.
“Woody was able to put the device on, log in, initiate and receive remote assist calls and undertake inspection work, and get us to help him step through a task on the machine. Which was pretty impressive,” says Alex.
It was a critical hurdle for Alex, who says, “A guiding principle for me around any new technologies or tools is that if someone needs to refer to a user manual, then your design isn’t good enough. This is key for providing the best support possible to our teams at site, especially during this time.”
The site team didn’t need a manual or formal training to effectively operate the HoloLens 2 device, just a bit of phone support. Alex had actually run an unofficial test at home with his mother-in-law, who was able to put on the HoloLens 2 device, open Remote Assist, and follow instructions to dissect a Lego model—a clear indicator that the solution was intuitive.
The trials with Woody allowed the team to fine-tune how the system would be used, and make sure that people using it stayed safe. For example, when someone’s climbing in and out of a truck cab, they flip up the headset visor so they are not distracted by holograms, and when they start using the system, they flip it back down and look around for a minute or two to let the system properly calibrate its surroundings.
BHP saw the opportunity for the solution to tackle the immediate challenge posed by COVID-19 travel restrictions—but also expose on-mine personnel to leading edge technology that could have long term benefits to the company.
After the initial trial and test of the system, it was used to support the planning and installation of the Dash Maintainer Tools product on a 300-ton Komatsu dump truck. The experts were in Perth while a mechanical fitter and an auto electrician actually installed the IoT system at site.
This demonstrated the power of HoloLens 2 and Dynamics 365 Remote Assist, which form the technical foundations of the solution used by BHP.
According to Kim Horton, BHP Field Maintenance Superintendent, “I’ve never seen people so excited—having a tool that enables them to do multiple things across different areas. To put a schematic in front of someone from a maintenance perspective, from the other side of the world or 1600 kilometers away in Perth, to help enable them.”
The deployment of mixed reality technology has the potential to be rolled out more widely and deliver safety and productivity benefits long after COVID-19 abates. And there is further scope in making the physical delivery of equipment to sites more efficient.
“This technology can help us reduce the time and cost associated with regular travel, increase the speed of maintenance and new equipment deployment without compromising safety, and support greater inclusion and diversity,” says Alex.
Lorraine Sabbouh, Mobile Equipment Maintenance Manager at BHP, leads a team of more than 150 frontline mechanics and auto electricians in the Pilbara. As a senior member of the BHP operations team, Lorraine is a fierce advocate for diversity and inclusion, with over 40 percent of her maintenance workforce being women.
“Every time Dash is rolled out on a new piece of equipment, we take another step in improving safety and helping to ensure everyone in our team goes home to their family in the same condition they turned up in. It’s been game changing in the way we do work.
“As a maintenance manager with a two-year-old, I need to work flexibly. Whether it’s the ability to be able to support my team at site without being there or understand the performance of the fleet, there is a lot of potential in this. Our increasing ability to build a more diverse workforce through the use of smart new technologies will play a key role in making work more accessible to people with different abilities.”
Having proven the HoloLens 2 solution’s potential, BHP is now running further trials across its rail workshops and maintenance teams in Perth and the Pilbara, and at several other global locations in Australia, the United States, and Chile.
“We are seeing promising early results,” says Alex. “If those trials are successful, we will look at how we can scale up. We are not getting ahead of ourselves, but we are well placed because the HoloLens 2 solution speaks to our existing systems such as security controls and device management.”
“Our experience with Dash and HoloLens 2 demonstrates how we can move quickly and safely as an organization when we have a clear goal and the space to try new things.
“I think we’re reflecting as an organization on how we can harness this drive and energy that comes from responding to a crisis and keep it going when we’re back to business as usual.”
Alex is clear that technologies such as IoT and mixed reality are most powerful when they are put in the hands of the people on the front line of our business.
“At BHP, our purpose is to bring people and resources together to build a better world.
“We’ve only been able to drive a step-change in safety, through bringing people like Woody from our frontline maintenance teams together with world class technologists, and empowering them with cutting edge IoT and mixed reality technology.
“When you get tech like this into the hands of the women and men at the front line of our business, it’s amazing to see what they can achieve to make our operations safer, smarter, and better.”
source:https://customers.microsoft.com/en-us/story/850776-bhp-energy-dynamics-365-hololens