Basil Read Mining is more than just a contracted mining service provider. The company is a long-term partner to its clients in the mining industry.
“We believe in safety, operational, and technological excellence. We operate mostly in the southern African region. Our ambition is to be a global company,” explains Nathan Williams, CEO and Managing Director of Basil Read Mining. “With that in mind, we use technology in a way that allows us to run operations more remotely. We use camera technology on our sites, web-based telemetry, and performance metrics. We take on the tough projects.”
Basil Read Mining keeps up to date on the latest technological innovations in the field, but at the same time, it will not try to fix what is not broken.
“We remain competitive by having a good mix of old and new equipment. We particularly like to keep our assets in the 40 to 60% remaining life space,” Williams says. “We try and empower our employees with knowledge of the future of the industry and technology. We want to move them into the automation space. We do not believe that means people lose their jobs. We believe it becomes an opportunity for upskilling.”
The reason that Basil Read Mining is able to keep hold of its older tools and technology, is because it takes good care of those tools.
“We look after our equipment. When we sell equipment into the market at end of life, we get better than market value because we have this reputation for looking after our machines very well,” Williams points out. “Pre-Covid our tools and equipment used to go only until the end of its first lifecycle. Then during Covid, we stretched that to the second life cycle, because we have a subsidiary called Hytronix, with technicians who can rebuild our excavators, drills, and trucks from scratch. We did a lot of that during Covid when the capital was tight.”
Basil Read Mining has good asset management in place and can depreciate its equipment based on component life, thanks to a rebuilt team who can rebuild components and extend the life of its equipment.
The Best of Old and New
Older equipment comes with a host of advantages, particularly in terms of the reliability of the equipment, and the ease of maintenance.
“When you have older equipment in service you can harness the skills of your employees,” Williams says. “The maintenance staff know the equipment very well. They can predict component life because they have been through those cycles before, they have better conditions monitoring, and they know the equipment and the life of the components. In that way, you get better predictability in your business, and we actually have all our asset managers do a week-by-week component forecast so we can plan replacements around cashflow and getting components ready or rebuild those components ourselves.”
That predictability is a valuable asset for Basil Read and its customers, allowing it to show potential enviable clients a track record of reliability figures despite longer hours on the equipment.
“That builds a lot of confidence,” Williams says. “It also means that you have equipment available to mobilise very quickly to take on a project. Sometimes projects can be in the pipeline for two or three years, but once the client has funding, they want you to mobilise in two or three months. We have a fleet available and can plan replacements within the life of that project. It is also easier when you have won a project because the pricing is a mix of new and old, so the funding becomes a lot easier for replacement parts.”
At the same time, Basil Read Mining is pushing the cutting edge of technology, bringing in automated and remote working processes to its projects to allow for greater flexibility and efficiency.
“We try and use AI on our camera tech so we can track operations and we believe that is key,” says Williams. “By monitoring continuously, it becomes easier to find where the bottlenecks are. It is a means for us to leapfrog the competition.”
The People Behind the Tools
Any technology is only as good as the people behind it, however, and Basil Read Mining boasts a vast reservoir of talent. However, finding and developing that talent is a challenge in itself.
“Because we have Hytronix as a subsidiary. Because it has a team of specialist technicians, there is always the prospect of an artisan in Basil Read Mining doing well and being recruited into Hytronix to become a specialist,” Williams says. “At the same time, when you start a project, you can use Hytronix to do the maintenance while you’re recruiting people, giving you credibility at start-up.”
Developing talent is a key philosophy throughout Basil Read Mining, with career development plans across every discipline.
“If as an operator you can demonstrate that you can operate more than one piece of equipment, you will be scheduled to operate different equipment and be paid more for that,” says Williams. “It helps with absenteeism. If someone is absent it now becomes an opportunity for an operator to upgrade themselves. So rather than just a production or bonus incentive, we shift towards developmental incentives, giving people a growth path for development.”
As well as offering staff opportunities for development, the company also aims to empower its staff, particularly those from historically disadvantaged backgrounds or demographics.
“We pride ourselves on empowerment of women,” Williams points out. “We have taken on female youth and trained them up on simulators. We train women to get an operator’s licence or even a driving licence and upskill them. We are trying to push women in mining initiative internally, and we really focus on our pipeline for promotion for female employees. It is particularly important in the context of South Africa, with our historically disadvantaged African female employees.”
As well as being the right thing to do, it also serves as a selling point for the company.
“I have already spoken about skills development, but we also invest in enterprise development. We like to take on local entrepreneurs and organisations and we have a very strong enterprise supply and development programme,” Williams explains. “In South Africa, you have Black Empowerment levels, and we are Level One- the top tier. That is an advantage in bidding, especially in the mining sector where it is a huge cost for a mine owner. Partnering with a Tier One or Level One Black Empowered company makes a huge difference. That Level One status is driven by our employment of Black women, local Black entrepreneurs and our enterprise development and skills development.”
With a strong team, and excellent tools old and new behind it, Basil Read Mining has great, and bigger plans for the future.
“With our longer-term contracts, we traditionally played in the 200-pound excavator, 100-pound truck sector or lower. But we see ourselves growing to use larger equipment and we want to carry out a stage-wide replacement, especially with contracts running five years or more,” Williams points out. “We want to shift into using larger equipment. It means you do not have to replace like-for-like, instead using fewer items of equipment with larger volumes. It means less maintenance is needed, so fewer operators are needed. That is where we see ourselves going. And then we put ourselves in line for bidding on projects that need larger equipment.”
It means Basil Read has big things in store for the future.
