In the first three months after deployment, GreaseBoss Critical Point Monitoring on a Tier 1 gold mine’s SAG mill discovered mistimed pumping, severe under-greasing at the feed end bearings and a failing pinion injector, enabling immediate work orders, closing compliance gaps and preventing a potential mill failure worth AU$25 million in lost production.
AU$25M
Lost production from a single mill lubrication failure
9 DAYS
Downtime caused by the previous Ball Mill failure
16
Endpoint Low Flow monitors across trunnion & pinion
124,900%
Return on investment
The Challenge
SAG and Ball Mills are the most critical assets on a gold mine — and they have almost no visibility at the critical grease lubrication interfaces on the trunnion and pinion.
The site’s only line of defence was a monthly physical inspection to report on grease delivery at each point. Between inspections, lubrication faults could develop and run undetected for weeks.
Before GreaseBoss, a single Ball Mill lubrication failure cost the customer 9 days of downtime and AU$25 million in lost production.
The Solution
Critical Point Monitoring
After the Ball Mill failure, GreaseBoss installed 16 Endpoint Low Flows across the trunnion and pinion to directly measure grease flow at every critical point.
The system gives the site reliability team:
- Daily visibility of actual vs planned grease delivery
- Simple reporting for compliance and proof-of-delivery
- Near real-time alerts when delivery falls out of range
Over the first three months, visibility over greasing data identified multiple system issues and enabled the site to raise work orders before any of them became failures.
Key Findings
01
Pump timing misconfiguration on trunnion points
The site expected 9.93 g of grease per hour at the trunnion points. The data showed the pump was delivering just 1.20 g per hour: only 12% of the target volume. Work orders were raised and the pump remedied before any critical failure occurred.
02
Severe under-greasing at the feed end bearings
Feed End Left and Right showed near-zero grease delivery for a week, bearings at high risk of premature failure. The site scheduled planned downtime to fix the lubrication system instead of suffering a major unplanned shutdown.
03
Early injector failure on the drive end pinion
The Drive End pinion showed persistently low, declining volumes across multiple cycles — the early signature of injector failure. GreaseBoss flagged the trend and the maintenance team immediately raised a work order to replace the failing injector.
04
Temperature-driven grease variability
Daily temperature swings were clearly visible in the delivery data: the mill was consistently under-greased during colder hours — critical evidence for assessing on-site grease heating systems and whether a different grease type is needed.
The Result
The GreaseBoss data enabled immediate work orders, restored proof-of-delivery and shifted the site’s maintenance methodology from preventive to prescriptive maintenance — de-risking a potential nine-day SAG mill outage.
1× SAG mill failure per year — minimum ~AU$25M in downtime
ROI = 124,900%
“A lot of good communication between the GreaseBoss representative and our site team.”
— Maintenance Superintendent
“We’re very appreciative of the data provided; it’s critical to roll this out across all of our sites.”
— Corporate Maintenance Lead