Speaking in Adelaide on Friday, Olympic Dam asset president Darryl Cuzzubbo said while significant improvements had already been made at the South Australian mine, there was still more work to be done.

"It is only reasonable that we do the best with what we already have before we ask for substantial capital for a potential expansion," he said.

"Once we are able to run our existing operation at full capacity we then, and only then, earn the right to grow."

Cuzzubbo said BHP had set a number of benchmarks for Olympic Dam by analysing both the operation and other competitors.

A key focus for the mine has been metres advanced per day per jumbo, and Cuzzubbo said a 15% improvement had already been made, bringing operations halfway towards a new benchmark target.

The company has also worked on increasing the stability of Olympic Dam's flash furnace, which has seen a 5% boost in reliability.

"It is initiatives like these, and many more like them, that will drive our success," Cuzzubbo said.

"While we still have a long way to go, our committed workforce and management team were able to deliver 11% more copper last year at a substantially lower cost."

Cuzzubbo said efficiency and productivity improvements were especially important amid weaker commodity prices, with copper, gold and uranium falling 33%, 35% and 50% respectively from their 2011 highs.

He said creativity had to be part of the cost-cutting process, and Olympic Dam had been able to find millions of dollars in extra revenue by recovering large pieces of scrap copper.

Despite chasing improvements across many parts of the operation, Cuzzubbo said it was also important to look at which initiatives would deliver the best results.

"At the moment the mine is our bottleneck, which means that we are starving our high fixed-cost surface processing infrastructure of copper," he said.

"By running different scenarios, we see that it makes more economic sense for the refinery - which is the back-end of our processing infrastructure - to be our bottleneck.

"This requires significant investment in opening up the underground mine so that it is no longer the constraint, and to de-bottleneck the surface so that we always keep the refinery fed.

"Our immediate challenge is how we self-fund the required investment by being prudent and creative with our capital and engaging our workforce to not only reduce costs, but also accelerate the initiatives that will reduce our costs."

Cuzzubbo's speech was presented at the University of South Australia as the 40th annual Essington Lewis memorial lecture.

Lewis was a notable Australian industrialist, joining BHP in 1904, rising to the role of chief general manager between 1938 and 1950, and eventually chairman between 1950 and 1952.