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Prior to engaging Metallurgical Systems, this greenfield copper concentrator had issues with the accuracy of its data. The site already had a few sources of data upon which it relied – however the information wasn’t centralised or coordinated, and didn’t provide an overall picture of the plant’s operations.
Our team worked closely with the plant’s engineers and operators to deploy MI Core®. This meant the plants disparate sources of – meaning information from the plant’s disparate sources of information were consolidated into the one, centralised database. This also involved creating a detailed dynamic plant model that could act as a digital twin to the process plant, using the historian, laboratory and manually entered data to calculate unrecorded streams, inventories and compositions and report at an hourly level. We also developed an export application so information from MI Core® could be seamlessly integrated with the plant’s existing enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution.
By creating a digital twin of the plant, and having all plant data centralised in MI Core®, we were able to uncover a number of efficiency, reporting and instrumentation issues together with the plant’s team. This included uncovering an overdosing of reagent, which was unnecessarily costing the plant up to US$26m a year; remedying incorrect reporting / data analysis, saving an extraordinarily costly plant shutdown which would have meant losses of around US$2m every hour of the shutdown; and detecting an overreporting of copper concentrate by US$7m.