After 18 months of successful field trials conducted across three Western Australian mine sites, MineWare announced the launch of its Argus Wheel Loader (WL) system—an OEM independent wheel loader monitoring system that lifts productivity and reduces the cost per tonne in real-time.

Argus WL delivers real-time feedback to the wheel loader operator via an intuitive touchscreen to make material handling and loading jobs safer, faster and more accurate.

MineWare Vice President of Marketing and Sales Roy Pater said Argus WL extends MineWare’s portfolio of monitoring systems as customers continue to digitize their operations and leverage real-time information across more of their ground engaging equipment.

“Building on the success of our world-leading Argus and Pegasys monitoring systems for electric rope shovels, hydraulic excavators and draglines, Argus WL was developed based on a growing demand from our customers to improve efficiency, effectiveness and payload accuracy across their large wheel loader fleets,”

“Argus WL does this by weighing each bucket in real-time, without the need to stop and calculate payload before dumping the load. This we understand from our customers is an unacceptable practice required from other similar systems today, losing valuable production time to repeat this with every bucket load.”

“Argus WL was a natural progression for us, meeting the industry’s need for a system purpose-built for large wheel loaders used in mining that would lower production costs, reduce machine stress and improve safety.”

Pater said the multi-purpose nature of the system was a key point of difference with Argus WL offering advanced functionality in truck detection, structural monitoring, as well as payload optimization in real-time.

“The real-time nature of Argus WL really stands our system apart as it gives operators direct feedback for them to make smarter loading decisions to optimize truck loading and payload management,”

“Argus WL guides operators to move the right amount of material with every load, helping mines to reduce payload variability, meet production targets and predict the operations forecasts more reliably when analyzing machine productivity by shift and operat

or.”

Developed on an open IoT platform, the interoperable system works on any OEM machine and integrates seamlessly with third-party production software.

Pater said Argus WL leverages MineWare’s 15 years of experience in ground engagement equipment monitoring, productivity improvement, and payload optimization to create a purpose-built system, made for mining.

“Talking to our customers, we knew that the best way to improve their wheel loader productivity was to empower their operators with better access to real-time, actionable information and give them a single platform that integrates with their existing software,”

“Argus WL takes productivity monitoring for wheel loaders to a new level, by working smarter, not harder, to get the job completed successfully.”

About MineWare

MineWare supports over 360 systems across more than 130 surface mining operations around the world to improve their performance and productivity. Delivering productivity gains of up to 16%, while reducing costs, MineWare’s monitoring systems provide mine sites with independent machine guidance and payload monitoring information for their large ground engaging machinery in real-time. In 2017, MineWare became part of the Komatsu Technology group of companies.