Global demand for resources has placed unprecedented pressure on the mining, minerals, and metals (MMM) industry today. Developing countries have large demands for steel to meet their construction needs, which drives the need for iron ore, nickel, vanadium and manganese. Electrification and construction further drive the need for copper and zinc to be used in cables, piping, and galvanising. Energy-hungry economies need coal to generate power. Automotive, medical, chemical and electronic companies are also driving precious metal demand, while jewellery and industrial cutting and drilling are driving increasing demand for the supply of diamonds.
The age-old principle of supply and demand does not come without its challenges. Not so long ago, the MMM industry was faced with years of pricing pressure, forcing some operations to close, and others to cut back on technology-spending to maintain profitability.
Ironically, it is technology that would have helped to get the ore to the processing plant both safely and faster; also to achieve optimal beneficiation, and to meet the customer's need for a quality product at the price and at the right time.
Inspiring a new way of thinking
Today, the MMM value chain consists of many disparate systems with great physical distances between them. To remedy plant optimisation headaches, standalone solutions have been implemented to solve today's challenges. Yet each process step in MMM can have a profound effect on the downstream processes; and lack of adequate system interoperability, or lack of a greater vision, has resulted in gaps of priceless data that could have saved lives, recovered more metal, or increased throughput.
Some companies have invested heavily in automation, and reporting systems. Others have chosen to be fast followers, or even late adopters of technology solutions. Nonetheless, the result has been islands of information that have left MMM executives without the realtime intelligence that they could so effectively use to dynamically respond to the ever-changing characteristics and requirements of the market.
Imagine if worker safety tracking, mine and blast scheduling, process control, process visualisation, laboratory data, process optimisation, production analysis, asset maintenance, and metallurgical accounting could be implemented in one solution. Imagine if that solution empowered all levels in the organisation by giving them the correct information in the right place, in realtime. Imagine if you could have that today?
Today, Proficy from GE Fanuc Intelligent Platforms inspires a new way of thinking as it delivers the technology for realtime intelligent production for MMM in a single solution.
Safety
People are the most valuable asset of any organisation. When South Africa experienced 199 mining fatalities in 2006, the mining industry set out to reach the target of reducing fatalities by 20% in 2007.
Imagine if you could instantaneously locate your people in the event of an underground emergency. Imagine if you know what equipment they had with them. Imagine if your people were only assigned a task if they had the appropriate training or qualifications. This would certainly be a valuable standalone IT project.
However, imagine if that solution could deliver more. Imagine if you could schedule a blast and get your people and assets there at the right time. Imagine if you could track your moving equipment and could optimise routes and availability. Alternatively, if you could capture ore quality and start to track it through the process. Or, if signals could be captured and historised for analysis of downtimes, MTBF, etc. Proficy delivers the solution to this new way of thinking.
Achieving more with the same
Bottlenecks throughout the MMM value chain provide unnecessary constraints. If infrastructure constraints were freed through ship and train scheduling, additional throughput could be achieved as long as the right material got to the right location at the right time to start the next leg of the journey.
Increasing the tonnage throughput would rely on the availability of equipment. This means understanding the main reasons for downtime and eliminating them. Why purchase expensive new equipment to add extra capacity when your existing investments could deliver up to 25% more if they ran at maximum capacity?
Proficy enables you to identify and improve areas that are causing operational inefficiencies. Perform root cause analysis to make data-driven decisions while tracking uptime, downtime and overall plant and machine efficiencies, through web-based key performance indicators (KPIs). Receive notifications on exceptions to desired operations, and make realtime changes. Imagine if this solution was part of your mine safety solution spoken of earlier, and not a standalone system?
Quality and laboratory systems
With complex process streams, and a need for extensive realtime and laboratory assay data, a quality management solution is the heart of any MMM organisation. Complex robotic laboratories also demand routing and tracking of samples to ensure accuracy and consistency.
Instead of installing standalone applications, Proficy can be used as the product of choice to integrate process and laboratory data. Importantly, Proficy has an extensive audit trail functionality, to ensure not only accuracy of data, but to understand reasons why data was changed. Research into anomalies and accurate record keeping of findings is crucial to the success of such a system.
With Proficy you will also be able to:
* Improve the quality and consistency of products and processes by defining the product specifications and recipes that are required for quality production.
* Capture reasons for out-of-spec conditions.
* Trend and analyse quality data across shifts, work cells and products to identify root cause in problem areas.
* Maintain consistent, high-quality production through realtime monitoring and visibility, by creating ad-hoc quality reports to research quality issues based on performance improvement and Six Sigma methodologies.
* Calculate quality KPIs and publish them to the web.
* Notify and alert personnel to out-of-spec conditions.
Imagine if this was all still available in one software suite.
Metallurgical accounting
Implementation of metal accounting and reconciliation such as defined by the Australian Mineral Industry Research Association's P754 standard, is an international best practice that provides auditable and validated data, for reconcilable financial accounting transparency and improved production and process reporting.
Legacy metal accounting systems inspired limited confidence in their results due to a combination of reasons, such as extensive manual entry, process complexity, disparate systems, data inaccuracies, unaudited changes to data, and standalone assets in large geographical areas.
Metal accounting has a tremendous thirst for data depending on the particular MMM process. Typically, a large precious metal organisation could have hundreds of mines and hundreds of value streams from the mill head, through smelting, concentrating and refining processes, requiring hundreds of thousands of data signals to be captured. By comparison, a gemstone organisation would not have the same volumes of data, but would still require complex intelligence to perform accurate recovery calculations.
Imagine if the data used in safety at the mine, in production monitoring and routing, in downtime analysis; and in laboratory data, was all part of the metal accounting system?
Reliability-centred maintenance
Reliability-centred strategies allow management to be proactive by analysing how combined maintenance and production operations impact the business productivity and profitability.
MMM operations are commonly dogged by the challenges of reactive maintenance, where manual systems are used to inform the enterprise asset management (EAM) system of production issues. Many times this does not happen, as the effort to do this is negated by the speed at which the production systems have to be fixed.
The most common missing piece in any solution is thus the ability, in realtime, to automatically capture many different production events, and have that automatically trigger Maintenance Work order Creation. This in turn would then evoke a chain of events that would expedite the closure of the work order and provide an optimised closed loop environment.
Proficy Maintenance Gateway solves this problem as it provides seamless realtime connectivity between the production environment and the EAM environment.
This allows realtime analysis and calculation of:
* Forward loop latency.
* Reverse loop latency.
* MTTR, MTBF.
* Time-to-work order generation.
Other functionality that it offers is:
* Operating locations of equipment.
* Equipment-related costs, histories, failures, etc.
* Work-order-related information for equipment.
* Failure codes to respond to equipment problems for immediate recording and analysis.
* Vendors, stores, and repair shops for equipment.
* Stocked and un-stocked spare parts.
This data can be used to drive decision-making throughout the organisation on an ongoing, realtime basis.
One software solution for your organisation
GE is passionate about ideas, change, people, technology and growth. These fundamentals are the DNA of a company with enough financial muscle to use imagination and passion to develop leading products and solutions for the exciting MMM industry.
Proficy from GE Fanuc Intelligent Platforms is a solution set that spans intelligent safety tracking, process control and optimisation, laboratory and quality systems, operational and maintenance excellence, data analysis and the foundation of metal accounting.
There is no need to imagine any more. One software solution in your organisation can be a reality with Proficy.
For more information contact Daniel Coetzee, GE Fanuc Automation, +27 (0)31 583 3640, [email protected], www.gefanuc.co.za
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