OREANDA-NEWS. Hitachi, Ltd. and Wenco International Mining Systems Ltd., a Canadian subsidiary of Hitachi Construction Machinery Co., Ltd., are proud to announce the beginning of a joint Proof of Concept (PoC) project. The PoC project, initiated by Hitachi and Wenco, and facilitated by Teck, will combine Hitachi's highly reliable cloud service and Wenco's Fleet Management System (FMS) with Teck's mining operation team to demonstrate how much the efficiency of the system will be improved. The results of the project will be evaluated for approximately 40 days after its launch on January 20.

In this PoC project, Wenco's FMS will be installed at Hitachi's data center in North America, and will provide cloud-based FMS service to Teck via the internet. Teck, a trusted leader in the mining industry, will support the project and provide feedback on the performance and efficiency of the system within one of its facilities located in British Columbia, Canada.

Using on-board computers, the Wenco FMS is installed on dump trucks, excavators and additional equipment. It displays mine-specific instructions for the operators that help increase efficiencies at a mine site. Currently, the FMS is individually maintained and operated on each mine site, but the cloud-based FMS service utilized in the PoC project will demonstrate the ability for mines with multiple sites to manage their mine sites from one facility. The goal of the project is to reduce the initial start-up and operating costs of the FMS in small-scale mining.

Hitachi and Wenco will work together toward the success of this PoC project and its future full-scale application in other mines. Hitachi has positioned the mining-related area as one of the core focus areas of the Social Innovation Business, and will accelerate the global rollout of these business activities. Also Hitachi has organized its smart information related products and services into "Intelligent Operations". After analyzing and evaluating the results of the project, Hitachi will advance the development of an "Intelligent Operations for Mining" solution as a part of its "Intelligent Operations".