Innovative application of quality management tools in a hard coal mine

Hard coal mines in Poland are more and more frequently implementing quality management systems, which obliges them to apply the principle of continuous improvement of both major and ancillary processes. Continuous improvement in an organisation can be implemented by means of a number of quality management methods and tools, which increase the effectiveness of processes in an organisation. However, in Polish hard coal mines the tools of quality management are very seldom used. The authors of the article want to show the possibility of using selected quality management methods in a hard coal mine, which are innovative for this enterprise and introduce a new quality of the processes. One of the major ancillary processes in a hard coal mine is maintenance. The effectiveness of this process depends on many factors, such as: keeping the technical equipment always ready, effective removal of failures and reducing the duration of downtimes caused by failures to minimum. The priority of the maintenance process is to keep the machines and equipment included in the mining system ready for production. High readiness can be maintained among others by shortening the time of failure removal. This is all the more important that the mining line is a serial system of machines – a failure of one machine prevents other machines from working. For this reason, implementation of a selected method of quality management will be proposed in this article to improve the effectiveness of the maintenance process in a hard coal mine. This will allow identifying the major causes of prolonged downtimes and finding an optimal solution to this problem.