Identifying the most effective and efficient production systems and then analysing these to determine the factors contributing to the results is paramount to the understanding, management and planning of future operations. There is a need to increase current productivity levels in underground coal mining and guidelines for achieving this need to be developed. Improvement in productivity and better resource utilisation as a consequence of this research effort, would derive a cost benefit difficult to quantify precisely, but is expected to be of the order of millions of Rand.