Streamline Major Shutdown Planning and Execution Solutions
Leading Gold Miner, 2024-2025
Overview
Major shutdowns are among the most capital-intensive events in any fixed plant mining operation. Poor planning, fragmented reporting, and manual data management can cost operators millions in overruns, missed compliance targets, and unplanned scope creep. For one of the world's leading gold producers, these risks were being managed across multiple sites and regions using a mix of manual SAP extracts, spreadsheets, and disconnected reporting workflows — a model that was no longer fit for the scale and complexity of their global operations.
MTS was engaged to support a comprehensive digital transformation of the client's fixed plant shutdown planning and execution process. The scope of work spanned the full shutdown lifecycle: from multi-year budgeting and event scheduling through to readiness planning, work order management, risk-based scope decisions, real-time execution reporting, and post-shutdown close-out review.
The result was a step-change in how the organisation plans, monitors, and reports on its most critical maintenance events, replacing fragmented manual processes with a structured, data-driven approach that drives consistency, compliance, and accountability across every site.
Challenge: Manual Processes at Enterprise Scale
Planning data was captured in spreadsheets and extracted manually from SAP, creating a significant administrative burden and introducing version-control risks. There was no single source of truth for the Major Events Calendar, the multi-year schedule of shutdowns across all sites and plant areas. Readiness milestones were tracked inconsistently, and weekly reporting to senior leaders relied on time-consuming manual compilation rather than live data.
Work order qualification was largely informal, with limited structured visibility into which orders were in scope, which were deferred, and which carried unacceptable risk if omitted. Risk assessment was not systematically linked to the scope-setting process, and there was no standard framework for capturing and escalating risks and opportunities across sites.
Solution: A Unified Shutdown Planning Portal
MTS led the design, development, and global rollout of a purpose-built shutdown planning platform that centralised every phase of the shutdown lifecycle into a single, user-friendly web portal. The platform was structured around five core functional areas, each addressing a distinct set of planning and reporting needs.
Frequently Asked Questions
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Fixed plant shutdown planning is the structured process by which mining operations schedule, prepare for, execute, and review planned maintenance shutdowns of processing plant equipment. Effective shutdown planning involves multi-year event scheduling, readiness task tracking, work order scope management, risk-based work selection, and post-shutdown KPI reporting. Poor shutdown planning is one of the primary drivers of maintenance cost overrun and unplanned production loss in the mining industry.
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Digital shutdown planning tools replace manual spreadsheet-based processes with centralised, integrated platforms that provide real-time visibility into readiness progress, work order status, scope changes, and risk exposure. Key benefits include elimination of manual SAP data extraction, consistent planning processes across multiple sites, automated reporting for leadership, and structured frameworks for scope governance decisions.
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One of the world's leading gold producers moved its shutdown planning into a single web portal built around five core functional areas. MTS led the design, development and global rollout. The portal covers the full shutdown lifecycle, from multi-year budgeting and event scheduling to readiness planning, execution reporting and post-shutdown close-out review, using the same process at every site.
