Newmont Mining

The inherent dangers in mining

Mining is one of the world’s most dangerous occupations. The hazards are real and ever-present with workers exposed to a variety of risks from cave-ins to explosions, vehicle collisions, crush injuries, and electrocution. It’s a high risk, high reward line of work. Andrew Johnston, Newmont Safety Officer says, “The most important thing to go down the mine every day is the miner, and the most important thing to come out of the mine is the miner. The softest thing that goes underground is you, that’s literally it. Everything else is rock and steel.” In order to manage these risks, Newmont knew they had to ditch their paper-based system.

Digitizing safety practices

Coordinating thousands of workers across multiple countries is a challenge. Newmont’s workforce hasn’t grown up with smartphones and tablets; their teams are often work in remote, dirty conditions thousands of feet below the earth’s surface.

Before digitizing inspections, Newmont struggled to conduct enough meaningful inspections with and reporting key findings to stakeholders in the organization. Newmont previously had auditors carry paper checklists, take photos on a camera, then return to the office where they spent hours drafting a report. It took time, many man-hours were lost, and fewer inspections were completed as a result. That process doesn’t exist anymore. Newmont now conducts over 1,000 inspections per day.  Management can see what’s occurring below ground in real-time.

With that saved time, and those safety processes in place and inspections signed off, the workers can now focus on the task at hand and make it home safely to their families every day.

Safety managers at Newmont can also customize all their templates for each task, team, and location, meaning workers in the field don’t spend any extra time filling out questions that are not relevant to them. Because SafetyCulture platform is designed to be mobile-first and with the user in mind, workers can use it with minimal training. The audit templates are centralized and through the platform ensuring that each site and employee has the correct audit and everyone is conducting the standardized inspections.