A robust mine planning process is critical to any underground mine in order to ensure resource development, reserve conversion and mine infrastructure capacity can support the scheduled mining activities over the long term. Mine Planning by Quarters (MPxQ) has been developed to ensure that all stages of mine planning, operations and mine services are integrated within the business plan.

The MPxQ has been used and modified for over 10 years at several locations and helped deliver improved production and compliance to the plan across the full range of planning horizons as measured against planning indicators. After the implementation of the MPxQ process at one mine the standard deviation of monthly production compared to quarterly forecast was reduced to 4kt from 11kt and compliance to budget was up to nearly 90% or close to a 10% improvement from the previous year.

A pillar of the MPxQ concept is a strong medium term planning capacity that provides a strong link between the life of mine plan and the short term operations schedules. This is achieved by evaluating the degree of resource conversion, level of engineering design confidence and scheduling detail required to allow the seamless flow of long term plans into achievable short term schedules.

The impact of delays due to inadequate or unavailable mine services are often ignored in many mine plans especially when they are built from historical mine productivities. Newgrange can model the existing mine services networks in order to demonstrate whether the designed ventilation and mine water network have the capacity and reliability to support the planned mining activities.