Building on our long history of innovation and early adoption to ensure a strong future for our company.
RACE21™ is Teck's innovation-driven efficiency program. It's about taking a company-wide approach to renewing our technology infrastructure, looking at opportunities for automation and robotics, connecting our data systems to enable broad application of advanced analytics and artificial intelligence, and empowering our employees, with a focus on making real progress between now and 2021. Successfully advancing initiatives like RACE21™ will be critical to our continued success as a business, by driving a step change in our performance and helping us remain competitive in a rapidly changing landscape.
Transforming Teck Through RACE21™
The successful mining company of the future will be built on a fully integrated digital platform. The Technology and Innovation team is working to build this platform for Teck, one that will increase safety and performance in real time, unlock knowledge about the resource base, improve planning for optimal resource extraction, and fully connect material and equipment flows.
Transformation Fundamentals
Analytics, automation and digital tools are fundamental to the transformation underway across the mining industry, and implementation of these will be critical to achieving RACE21™ goals: unlocking significant economic value and building lasting competitive advantages for Teck.
"We’re not simply looking to automate what we do today. We’re completely transforming how we do things." - Andrew Milner, Senior Vice President, Technology and Innovation
Here’s How
Analytics will provide our employees with actionable insights to drive productivity improvements across our value chain and to understand the condition of our equipment, as well as extend lifespan and predict failure. This information will provide actionable insights to drive productivity improvements across our value chain.
Automation will make mobile fleets far more efficient by increasing utilization while reducing variability. The result will be improved safety, reduced energy consumption and equipment wear and tear, as well as greater flexibility to change mine designs. Additionally, many manual management processes, like production and maintenance planning, procurement and reporting, will become faster and more accurate at lower costs.
Connectivity will provide a digital platform to link unit operations to upstream and downstream activities, which will identify significant opportunities for improvement. For example, the platform will integrate geoscience, mine plan, and mobile equipment schedules to intelligently target the highest-value ore. Likewise, by harnessing real-time production and maintenance information, we can optimize downstream logistics to efficiently deliver products to port and our customers.
What’s Next?
In early June, Teck established a RACE21™ Value Delivery team. Led by Ryan Sword, Director, RACE21™ Value Delivery, and with a commitment to demonstrate Teck’s ability to develop and implement analytics solutions that create measurable value, the team’s immediate priority is to work in partnership with operations to drive value from a number of initiatives already underway. These initiatives span advanced analytics for drill and blast, haul cycle, processing optimization and maintenance.
Planning for execution of these initiatives in 2020 and beyond is underway, and additional initiatives will soon kick off in close partnership with operations.
