WWT Digital

Our Work

Freeport McMoRan

Freeport McMoRan

Democratizing Data to Reach New Levels of Productivity

Global mining firm Freeport-McMoRan partnered with WWT to better harness big data and unlock hidden productivity.

Overview

Freeport-McMoRan, a global mining firm that collects millions of data points daily from its large fleet of haul trucks, wanted to tap into trapped productivity hiding in its data. WWT partnered with Freeport to help build the Haul Truck Operator Scorecard (HTOS), an intuitive, user-centric web application that translates massive loads of data into clear and actionable insights. We helped Freeport capture, analyze and make sense of hundreds of millions of data points so their mine sites could have their best day every day.

Solutions

Capabilities

Strategic Planning & Consulting

  • Business and technology mission alignment
  • Product vision, planning and management
  • Tech and platform assessments
  • Organizational and financial modeling
  • Partnership criteria, vetting and selection

Development and Integration

  • Agile software development
  • Agile team transformation training
  • Dev Ops | Platform engineering | Infrastructure as code
  • 3rd party platform integration Labs-as-a-Service

Research and Insights

  • Target- and existing-user research
  • Stakeholder interviews
  • Operational and digital friction mapping
  • Competitive research and benchmarking
  • Product and marketing growth analytics
  • Industry and tech insights

User Experience Design

  • Conceptual art-of-the-possible visioneering
  • Product UX and interface design
  • Product guidelines and design systems
View Capabilities

This is one of those unique solutions that hits just about every facet of modern data science, AI and cloud computing architecture. It's a really sophisticated solution technically.

Robert Catron, Manager of Global Data Science, Freeport-McMoRan

Challenge

Massive loads of data

Freeport- McMoRan recognized the imperative need to leverage every potential for improvement but struggled with the how. A Freeport haul truck will carry – in a regular work day – weights of 110 tons (that’s a million pounds of raw material). With their drivers working in high risk environments, work health and safety is the primary-daily concern for Freeport. What was missing was a way to tap into their trapped productivity, harnessing their data in a way that made their work safer while increasing their productivity. Freeport needed help, and sought out a holistic solution using data science.

Approach

Making it all make sense

WWT was able to partner with Freeport to capture loads of data using the web application Haul Truck Operator Scorecard (HTOS). HTOS provides tens of millions rows of applicable data daily that gets processed, removing noise and presenting useful data back to the users, delivering:

  • Behavioral insights for continuous improvement: Digesting daily performance and behavioral data to take a more proactive and prescriptive approach to the haulage cycle, boost efficiency, allow for better coaching from supervisors and give leadership end-to-end visibility.
  • Machine learning application: Real-time location monitoring data plus a machine learning algorithm that factors in road conditions, travel speed, road curvature, intersections and hard turns to track trucks in real-time and drive efficiencies.

Outcome

A sophisticated technical solution

HTOS is hailed for providing immeasurable amounts of information, allowing employees to be better than they were the day before, and making the Freeport work site safer. Freeport became the recipient of the NIOSH Mine Safety and Health Technology Innovations Award, in 2020, for HTOS. This is an exciting initiative that continues to bear fruit.

  • Culture of innovation: Key decisions — from the boardroom to inside haul trucks — are now driven by a combination of data, analytics, and human expertise, with data analysis and knowledge workers working together to identify areas for improvement.
  • Compounding ROI: A reliable data and analytics foundation has unlocked exceptional ROI across a variety of use cases, which helps Freeport realize compounding returns as it continues to scale the solution across its enterprise.
  • Predictive and proactive: With a comprehensive view of its entire portfolio of sensors, trucks and other data-emitting assets, Freeport is now able to leverage predictive analytics to take purposeful and prescriptive actions to optimize future productivity.
  • Continuous improvement: HTOS gave operators access to feedback on inputs so they could learn quickly and enabled supervisors to recommend effective performance boosting strategies based on tangible data.