The system that’s helping us unlock our potential

Safe Production System (SPS) boosts Amrun production capacity.

Last updated 18 February 2025

 

In 2024, our Amrun bauxite mine in Australia hit its production capacity for the first time since operations began in 2018. At the heart of this success was Rio Tinto’s Safe Production System (SPS), and Amrun is just one of the sites where we’re seeing SPS have a valuable impact. 

The right foundations 

Many of the best companies in the world operate to a production system. They do this to ensure consistency in what they produce, to remove bottlenecks, to drive a culture of continuous improvement, and to produce goods in the most efficient way. Having a production system is about getting the foundations right. 

At Rio Tinto, SPS gives us the building blocks to becoming the best operator. It guides us on how we look after our people and our assets, how we prioritise and improve, and how we solve problems so they don’t reoccur. SPS has been built by our people. Each of its parts – best practices, leadership skills, and mindsets and behaviours – keep us on the path to being the best in the business.  

That’s important, because being the best operator means being the safest. Being the most efficient and profitable. People want to work here. Suppliers and customers want to deal with us. Our communities are proud to have us nearby.  

“Becoming best operator is a critical objective that underpins our other objectives,” Mark Davies, Chief Technical Officer explains. “For us this means great teams bringing their best every day, to safely and sustainably realise the full value of our assets.” 

SPS is how we will achieve our objective.  

“We’re transitioning from being an organisation of ‘fixers’ to one of ‘problem solvers’,” Mark adds. “This involves equipping every individual with the skills and tools necessary to address root causes and prevent issues from reoccurring.” 

We started rolling out SPS in July 2021, and it’s now reached 80% of our sites. At the sites where the adoption of SPS is now most mature, we’re seeing a sustained performance uplift. Beyond productivity, SPS is shaping our culture and the felt experience of our employees. Employee satisfaction scores have increased on average by 2 points at sites where SPS is deployed, and SPS sites typically achieve better safety outcomes. 

The 4 elements of SPS

  1. Great people are at the heart of SPS. It’s about finding common ways to solve problems, support teams and empower our people – especially our frontline.
  2. Strong, stable assets that are operated and maintained in a planned, predictable and controlled way
  3. A focus on customers, to deliver quality work and products.
  4. Effective, simple processes: the rituals we follow to achieve our annual plans and deliver value.
Amrun record performance

Smashing production records

The potential of SPS is clear to see at the Amrun mine in Far North Queensland, where it helped the team break monthly bauxite production records 3 times in 2024 and open up new international export markets.

For the first time since the mine started operating, it reached its nameplate capacity of 22.8 million tonnes a year. The site delivered a year-on-year production uplift of 12%, and achieved a record quarter in Q4.

The team says the journey they’ve been on is even more important than the results themselves. With SPS, they have been building a culture and embedding ways of working that set them up for the long term, beyond the success story of one year.

“The culture shift at Amrun has been about building capacity in our leaders, and empowering our people,” Haydon, Superintendent, Operations, says.

“SPS provides the core of our day-to-day rituals. It gives us tools for problem solving and allows our leaders to support the frontline and turn problems into opportunities. And those opportunities have helped us deliver the results.”

SPS has enabled the site to learn from those at the frontline, who see the process up close, and be more proactive in finding ways to improve. It has also helped to create connections and pride among colleagues. “Before, everyone had individual goals, now everyone’s got one goal,” Massie, Supervisor, Amrun Plant Operations, says. “It’s the place where everyone wants to be.”

How they did it

Amrun’s leap in production performance points to 3 winning factors:

1. SPS and AM

The combined introduction of SPS and the Asset Management (AM) Uplift programs, plus an intense focus on a stable plant feed from the remotely managed Operations Centre in Brisbane, drove the uplift.

The Amrun team concentrated on key SPS best practices, and the AM team looked at where improvements could be made in materials handling, throughput in the circuit and the site’s shutdown strategy.

2. Kaizen

Kaizen (problem solving) best practice events generated ideas to improve plant flow by 6%, to eliminate shutdown losses entirely since March 2024, and have the potential to improve port capacity by 10% by focusing on vessel turnaround time.

3. Culture

Amrun has developed a site culture that’s committed to solving problems, standardised processes, and building the skills of frontline teams in shutdowns and asset management to achieve predictable performance.

Underpinning everything was a concerted effort to empower people, and shift mindsets and behaviours to a problem-solving mentality.

Becoming best operator

As we go deeper with SPS across Rio Tinto, it will help us unlock the true potential of our assets, and will be one of our key focus areas as we accelerate our journey towards best operator.

“Everything we are doing ultimately links to our people and our culture,” Mark says. “It is shaping how we learn and continuously improve, how we draw on the power of psychologically safe work environments, how we use and apply data and technology to improve and innovate, how we make it as easy as possible for our people to get things done, and ultimately how we put our assets and operators at the centre of what we do – so they can bring their best every day, which will enable us to become best operator.”