MMD Group has delivered two new Sizer Stations to the Mae Moh lignite mine in Thailand for the Electricity Generating Authority of Thailand (EGAT), extending a multi-phase upgrade from conventional crushers to modern mineral sizing. The stations use MMD’s twin-shaft sizer technology to handle variable lignite feed while controlling product top size for downstream power plant requirements. For mine planners and maintenance teams, the shift to modular sizer stations implies different layout, foundation loading, and wear-part strategies compared with traditional primary crushing plants.

Hitachi Construction Machinery and Australian autonomy specialist Pronto have signed a global memorandum of understanding to develop open-architecture mine automation for haul trucks and other mobile equipment. The partnership targets interoperable fleet control, collision avoidance and autonomous haulage that can integrate with mixed OEM fleets rather than locking sites into proprietary ecosystems. For mine operators, this signals more flexible retrofit options for existing Hitachi and non-Hitachi fleets, with potential to phase in autonomy on brownfield haul roads and benches without full system replacement.

Liebherr is deploying application engineers such as Michael Anthony to mine sites to analyse real operating conditions, combining machine data logging, digital simulations and on-board monitoring to close performance gaps in ultra-class haul trucks and excavators. Teams are benchmarking duty cycles, payload distributions and fuel burn against OEM envelopes, then adjusting parameters like digging geometry, bucket sizing and truck–shovel match to lift effective utilisation without hardware changes. For engineers, the message is to treat OEM support as a data-driven optimisation service, not just maintenance, with gains coming from cycle-time diagnostics rather than new fleet purchases.