Transcript
The reason I joined Catalyst was I worked at Barrack for 13 years.
I was previously the commercial manager of Plutonic.
I’m aware of not only Plutonic but the Plutonic belt. And I was aware that there were different assets owned by different owners and the thought of consolidating those assets into one entity, I thought was a very exciting proposition.
Having worked in Zambia and Saudi Arabia, and Western Australia previously, I was drawn back to the Plutonic mine because I’m aware that it’s a complex ore body. I like a challenge.
Those jurisdictions that I have worked in were very challenging.
The people at Plutonic have been there a long time, and I guess I was aware of what we can do to make things better.
The challenge coming to Plutonic has really been around, we have a new plan.
It’s a more robust plan that they’ve been using previously, and it’s really about realigning people to what are the priorities of the mine.
I’ll give an example. So in the past, Plutonic has used a total ore movement as its as its metric. And yet that comprised development and production ore when essentially production ore is the major metric and they’ve gone away from that.
So our focus has really been on generating stoke ore and being consistent about it. It’s been, it’s been about focusing on the basics and getting them right.
What’s more important a good ore body or a good team? Well, they sort of go hand in hand, to be honest. If you don’t have a good ore body you don’t have a mine.
But obviously, the dirt doesn’t move itself and you need great people to do that. So, to me, that probably is equally as important.
In terms of our focus at site, it really hasn’t been around cost at this point.
It’s really been about stabilizing the operation, ensuring that our production metrics match and our consistent and robust.
As part of that, obviously you’re harnessing efficiencies, so costs do come down.
There has been some low fruit there, like high equipment that we’ve been able to remove.
But the next phase of our approach, I guess, is really goning be around investigating each contract and going through it, in a structured manner. But at the moment, it’s about getting production stabilized.
