ABB Ability Condition Monitoring for belts collects and tracks data from conveyor belts. Courtesy of ABB

For a mining operation, unplanned downtime is not only the enemy of productivity—it also makes for a very expensive inconvenience. “A general rule of thumb is, a planned job is going to be one and a half to three times cheaper than the same job that is unplanned,” said Andrew Johnston, asset management solution executive at RPMGlobal. On the scale of a yearly budget, such a gap becomes significant quickly.