At a glance a visitor to the operations centre – out near the Perth Airport – can see Rio Tinto’s entire iron ore operation.

With this sort of visibility comes great decision-making power.

Rio Tinto Pilbara Iron Ore president Greg Lilleyman said this sort of visualisation had enabled the company to more easily identify bottlenecks anywhere in its system.

One such bottleneck happened to be the car dumpers at the ports.

Another benefit is that it brings together plant operations staff who would never speak to each other.

“We’re getting productivity improvements from having plant controllers sitting next to each other and learning from each other,” Lilleyman said.

The OC also proved its worth when the Pilbara was beset by some extremely wet weather.

The dynamic schedulers in the centre were able to reroute trains to parts of the system that were not affected by the rain.

The OC also has led to a 70% improvement in schedule reliability in the iron ore business from 2008.

There also have been maintenance benefits.

The visibility the OC screens give has allowed the maintenance people there to be 200% more proactive. They have the visibility to better align maintenance tasks.

This visibility works brilliantly for an integrated system such as Rio Tinto Pilbara Iron Ore.

Iron ore operations are, after all, really just large logistics operations. The more efficiently dirt can be moved from the pit to the port the better. With a network of 14 mines, 1500km of haul routes, three port terminals, nine berths and three power stations an OC really comes into its own.

This is why BHP Billiton is understood to be looking at setting up its own operations centre.

There also has been talk of Newcrest doing the same.

So can the concept be spread to other areas?

Lilleyman said an OC could work well for other commodities, such as copper. However, unlike iron ore where the view is focused on the pit to port side, the copper view could be further downstream looking at ways to optimise the smelting and refining of the metal.

Lilleyman said this sort of approach was being considered for Rio Tinto’s Kennecott Utah copper operation.

According to Rio Tinto head of innovation John McGagh, the company is building a second OC.

However, McGagh refused to say where that centre would be.

What is surprising to outsiders – and to some of the insiders involved with the project – is the speed with which the OC concept came together.

The first operations centre was run out of Rio Tinto offices on St Georges Terrace, Perth. It was very much driven by the company’s iron ore division.

That “centre” ran the West Angelas plant and pit control.

The centre was set up on a normal desk in a normal office.

From there it grew to some desks outside Lilleyman’s office, which at that stage was in the Wesfarmers building, also in the Perth CBD.

That centre was in charge of Rio Tinto’s east Pilbara operations – Yandicoogina and Hope Downs.

From there the concept was extended to running the full Pilbara operations.

That the OC is at the Perth Airport is no coincidence. This has allowed the centre to be plugged into the same grid as the Perth Airport air traffic control system. This is a protected grid. There also is a 9000 litre diesel tank on the site to run back-up generators should that fail.