Dear New Program Participant,

Welcome to the Metcom Instructional Program on Plant Grinding Operations! You are about to embark on a learning experience which will provide you and your company with all the skills needed to achieve excellence in grinding processing performance. As other learners before you have expressed, you will hopefully gain tremendous personal satisfaction from putting new, practical skills to work, and then actually seeing the benefits in your operation. And your company will gain financially from engineering methods that have already proven to deliver greatly improved economic performance in the industry.

If you are like me, you have probably become frustrated trying to decipher some practical knowledge that you can put to good use from technical presentations or literature. Often, such efforts are simply a waste of time. Our objective in creating this program was to compile for you everything that is needed – and omitting that which is not – into one, complete package. And the role of our Instructional Design Specialists was to totally remove the barriers to learning. Every module you take has been written, reviewed, tested, revised and then retested as many times as necessary to ensure that learning of the described skills actually takes place. So whether you are doing the complete program, a portion of it related to your role in operations, or a Special Topic Program aimed at a specific unit operation or task, the “Instructional Design Process” that has been applied here guarantees your competence in those skills when you are done.

But of greater importance than the learning method, of course, is what you will learn! From the precise meaning and methods of Bond Work Index Analysis; to the breakthrough understanding of closed-circuit grinding that Functional Performance Analysis provides; to the plant process improvement methods afforded by slurry pump and cyclone application engineering; to the detailed plant sampling and survey data acquisition methods used to measure ongoing improvements; you will learn everything you need to know to get the job of improving plant grinding performance done. Program input from top technical experts in their fields, and certification by the Engineering Institute of Canada assures you of the quality of the program content. Or just talk with a previous program participant to sense the enthusiasm they will offer for this training.

I am confident that you will both enjoy and benefit from these materials. I would be pleased to hear from you personally with your feedback. While the response from our colleagues in industry has been overwhelmingly positive, we always welcome the chance to improve and refine our product for future mineral processing industry learners.

Yours truly,

Rob McIvor
General Manager & Chief Metallurgist, Grinding Systems