Company Profile: Orica is an Australian multinational company listed on the ASX. The company is one of the world's largest providers of commercial explosives and blasting systems to the mining, and quarrying industries.
My role in the design team at the Kurri Kurri technical center was to provide mechanical and structural design drafting services. Our team would provide chemical delivery systems for explosive materials for mining companies our projects focused on either fixed plant and mobile plant.
Our team consisted of a manager, engineers, graduate engineers and draftspersons we would take part in safety studies throughout the design process. The mining industry has general safety standards and yet each individual mining site has their own unique standard when it comes to safety. For example, rings and jewelry are not permitted on Rio Tinto sites across the board yet Glencore and Newcrest mining sites do not seem to have the same policies.
So, when it comes to designing safe systems each mine site has a different set of rules which leads to more custom design to meet each sites safety policies. My role was to take a set of standard Orica parts be it Horizontal Displacement Pumps, Augur, Tank, Bunded Area, a Commercial Vehicle and provide a virtual 3-D that could be simulated to meet the design scope in a safe fashion.
Apart from safety one of the other considerations our team faced was that we would produce a design or set of drawings that would be manufactured locally to the mine site. This would mean drawings would need to be fully checked prior to issuing for manufacture. Furthermore, not having manufacturing input in the design process from the manufacturer was an area where both my Participative and coaching Leadership styles where future developed. Having completed a fitting and machining apprenticeship offered the team manufacturing experience in terms of how to and what information is required to deliver a cost-effective design along with sharing with the team what a manufacture would expect. Having said that manufacturing could be in Australia, South America or anywhere else around the world.
I enjoyed working on both fixed plant process and mobile plant delivery systems.