The Invisible Victory: Why Your Worst Production Days Reveal Your Best People

It’s 4:47 AM on a Tuesday that started wrong and got worse. Shift Supervisor Mike Green is standing in the dispatch office trailer, radio crackling with bad news while he stares at a production board that looks like a war zone.

Shovel 6 threw a hydraulic line twenty minutes into shift – that’s 3,000 tons per hour sitting idle while maintenance scrambles for parts. 8 trucks need to be re-assigned because the backup loading unit is down as well, 4  trucks will have to be parked because the other hauls just can’t absorb them all. Truck 47 has a rookie operator who’s burning through the service brake like it’s made of butter on the 12% grade leaving the pit. The weather station is calling for thunderstorms by noon, which means pulling all equipment out of the pit for loaded blast pattern. And somehow, inexplicably, the coal quality from the 11 seam he has been running to the plant has changed – a thin seam of black jack (Carbonaceous shale) that has the plant superintendent breathing down his neck.

By the numbers, this shift is already toast. The spreadsheet gods have spoken: today will be a red day on the monthly report, the kind that draws uncomfortable questions from corporate and sideways glances in the morning safety meeting.

But here’s what the spreadsheet doesn’t know:

In the next six hours, Mike and his dispatcher will orchestrate seventeen equipment and manpower play call moves that keep tonnage flowing despite Shovel 6’s tantrum. He’ll radio dispatch to reroute three drivers around the soft spot developing near the dump access road – a call that prevents what could have been a costly stuck truck situation. When the storm hits earlier than forecast, he’ll have crews positioned and equipment staged for the fastest restart in recent memory. The rookie driver? Mike pairs him with veteran operator Sarah, who talks him through better grade descent techniques over the radio, turning a liability into a learning opportunity.

The final tally: 87% of target tonnage moved, zero safety incidents, and a crew that went home exhausted knowing they’d wrestled chaos into submission and won.

Corporate will see the 87% and frown. What they won’t see is that on a day when everything that could go wrong did go wrong, Mike’s team delivered what many “good” days couldn’t: proof that when the pit throws its worst punch, human judgment and experience can still land a serious counterblow.

After watching too many hard-fought shifts like this get buried under upper management’s silent condemnation and spreadsheet scrutiny, I knew something had to change. That’s what drove me to develop the OpenMine OS software platform – tools designed specifically to highlight the tireless efforts operations teams make daily to save production from the relentless ravages of the managed chaos of complex mining systems. Because the real story of mining isn’t written in tonnage reports – it’s an operational game of 5D chess written in the split-second decisions that keep the wheels turning when everything else wants it to stop.

The more corrosive problem is often the unspoken dismissal of team excellence that doesn’t show up in standard metrics just because they didn’t hit 95% or better of a shift target. It’s time for a change.