MTS Projects: Fire Incident Reporting for Mining Equipment

Introduction: Fire-related Incidents are a Significant Risk

Fire-related incidents involving mobile assets—such as haul trucks, loaders, and excavators—represent one of the most critical safety risks in the mining industry. For a leading global gold miner, managing these risks was historically hindered by fragmented data and manual reporting processes. Previously, fire event tracking was handled through localised, manual Excel dashboards. This decentralised approach led to significant inconsistencies, as data was often prone to human error, time-consuming to compile, and lacked the real-time visibility required for proactive safety management.

Recognising the need for a more robust solution, the mining house engaged MTS to design and implement an automated global reporting solution. The goal was to move beyond reactive reporting and establish a high-integrity, centralised data environment that could track fire incidents across multiple sites worldwide, ensuring that every event is documented, triaged, analysed, and visibility was available to all key individuals.

Project Deliverables: A Foundation of Data Integrity

To bridge the gap between site-level incidents and corporate-level oversight, MTS developed a comprehensive technology stack tailored to the client’s existing infrastructure. Key deliverables included:

• Centralized Data Architecture: We engineered a robust database to serve as the single source of truth which harvested data from multiple site systems. This allowed for the seamless aggregation of historical and real-time incident data from various global sites into one secure location.

• Custom Web Entry Forms for Event Classification: To drive standardisation, webforms were rolled out to “augment” the base data with standardised corporate categories and actions.

• Interactive Power BI Dashboards: MTS designed a suite of intuitive, interactive dashboards that visualise fire event trends. These tools allow stakeholders to drill down into specific incident types, asset classes, or geographical regions, providing immediate clarity on safety performance.

Outcomes: Data-Driven Safety Success

The transition from manual tracking to the MTS automated solution has delivered transformative results for the client. By establishing a single source of truth, the mining house now benefits from improved visibility into fire-related safety events.

Since the implementation, the client has seen a measurable improvement in the quality of reporting events. This improvement is largely attributed to the "visibility effect"—with better data, management can identify high-risk patterns and implement preventative maintenance or operator training before an incident occurs. Furthermore, the streamlined workflow has saved many work-hours annually, while the improved data quality ensures that global safety audits are now supported by verifiable, high-integrity evidence. Through this project, MTS has demonstrated that better data is not just an IT metric—it is a fundamental driver of a safer, more proactive mining operation.