Komatsu Australia’s Smart Quarry Site is helping quarry operators make informed decisions.
When it comes to fleet management solutions, Komatsu Australia’s Smart Quarry Site (SQS) has stood the test of time.
The SQS platform, developed in Australia, has been used worldwide across many quarrying applications. Instead of isolated systems and relying on “gut feel”, SQS provides a single source of truth, bringing together data, operator performance, site safety and maintenance into a single platform.
Komatsu Australia product management for Smart Quarry Site Shaun Kean said part of the reason was that SQS helped quarries deal with modern problems.
“Smart Quarry Site has been in the market for several years now, and the reason it’s still so relevant is that the challenges in quarries haven’t gone away; they’ve intensified,” he said.
“Most operations are under pressure to move more tonnes with fewer people, while managing fuel costs, safety obligations and emissions. SQS was built specifically for that world.
“Over time, we’ve evolved the SQS system – adding things like CO₂ and fuel burn insights, enhanced electronic pre-start checks, safety and machine health views, and more powerful utilisation and operator scorecards.”
“It gives site and project managers an at-a-glance, near-real-time view of production, machine utilisation and material movement across the entire quarry – extraction, haulage, dumping and stockpiles – on one platform.”
SQS was developed by Komatsu Australia in partnership with its subsidiary iVolve, in direct consultation with operators in the quarrying sector. Their feedback, as Kean said, ensured that the metrics were important to the daily running of a quarry operation.
Because of this, SQS can integrate directly with a machine’s telematics and onboard sensors. As a brand-agnostic tool, SQS can work within a mixed fleet set-up as well as Komatsu equipment and provide actual machine-reported values. Compared with reverse-engineered or interpolated data, machine-reported data is often more accurate, allowing operators and managers to use it confidently when making decisions.
By integrating into the machine’s telematics, SQS can provide real-time feedback to the operator as they perform daily tasks. Operators can receive real-time insights into payload accuracy, target destinations and operating behaviour. This feedback is delivered into the cabin and can help operators achieve consistent payloads, reduce idle time, and avoid overloading machines.
Kean said that through this function, SQS became a continuous-learning tool that could boost on-site productivity.
“Because we designed SQS with quarries and major civil jobs in mind, not generic transport or mining, the insights, feedback, dashboards, reports and terminology are very ‘quarry fluent’,” he said.
“This means that SQS differs from other options in a few key ways. One of them is that real-time feedback for operators can be displayed on the cabin screen. This feedback can help them self-correct and improve as they operate the machine.”
SQS goes beyond site productivity, in line with Komatsu’s aim to support the entire quarry ecosystem. Safety is fundamentally important to the quarrying sector, which is why it is a cornerstone of the SQS platform.
SQS includes electronic pre-starts and defect workflows to help operators identify and address safety issues. As all defects are digitised and time-stamped, maintenance teams can spot recurring issues that increase downtime and intervene with a proactive preventative maintenance strategy that enhances compliance and machine uptime. This also avoids the need to record pre-starts on paper and ensures a transparent approach to safety across the whole quarry operation.
The platform also provides animated visualisations of every production movement from loading to machine movement to the site circuit. This provides managers with a comprehensive, at-a-glance view of activity within the quarry to ensure oversight of safe operations and key performance indicators, including cycle time, fuel burn, and machine uptime.
“The benefits of SQS go beyond telematics. It is effectively a production and safety tool for quarries that happens to use telematics,” Kean said.
“We built the dashboards with input from industry experts and end users so that they show the information supervisors actually need, updated in five-minute increments and available in configurable reports.
“We have seen that customers who use SQS typically see improvements in productivity, fuel efficiency, idle time and safety within the first year. Many sites achieve a return on investment in less than 12 months.”
In one case, an Australian hard rock quarry used SQS to analyse truck cycle times and its loader utilisation rate. The SQS data showed that trucks were queuing at the crusher despite a second loading unit being underutilised.
With the help of SQS, the supervisors used the haul-circuit analysis to adjust the loader placement and rebalance its operational fleet.
This led to the quarry achieving reduced cycle times, increased tonnes-per-hour and lower idle time and fuel burn.
Another quarry used SQS’s in-cabin operator feedback, along with real-time alerts for exceeding speed limits and gear selection, to help operators self-correct when transporting material down a steep haul road.
The results showed a significant reduction in speeding incidents and reduced brake wear, which also helped with maintenance costs.
“When we talk about return on investment, we talk about the dollar value a lot, but there are so many other things that also go into it, which SQS can provide,” Kean said.
“There’s an enhanced safety aspect, improved operator performance from the continuous feedback, and these factors not only support the return on investment, but they also help the quarry’s bottom line.”
Komatsu Australia’s team provides support to all of its SQS customers from conception to commissioning of the tool across its fleet. They can help operators, managers and supervisors learn how to interpret the data and get the most out of it for their operations. Kean said digital tools like SQS are going to play an increasingly important role in the quarrying sector.
“We know quarries will continue to evolve their fleets over time; SQS gives them a stable, OEM-agnostic digital platform to grow with,” he said. “At the moment, we’re seeing quarries evolve rapidly, and digital tools like Smart Quarry Site will be central to how operations run over the next decade.
“SQS will enable quarries to shift from reactive to proactive decision making, which will improve productivity and safety. As quarries become integrated digital ecosystems, SQS can be that central platform that ties together production, machine health, safety insights and operator behaviour.” •
For more information, visit komatsu.com.au
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