The vision of BRMO (Black Rock Mine Operations) is proudly exclaimed in the BRMO Game Plan as the following:
“Together creating prosperity for all stakeholders by responsibly growing our business through pride and innovation”.
Flowing from our vision of innovation a Technology Road Map was developed to guide us on our Digital Transformation journey.

Background

The successful establishment of the BRMO Central Control Room (CCR), as presented at the 2018 X-Change conference, is seen as the first major milestone on our Digitisation journey. The CCR established the technology infrastructure to fulfill current and future technology requirements in terms of networking, processing platforms, high availability of services, and visualisation technology. The CCR integrated available BRMO systems and information sources to provide a holistic view across systems, providing operational staff the necessary tools to enhance real-time decision making.

Business Digitisation Vision

Guided by our Technology Road Map and BRMO vision we identified strategic areas of digitisation. The establishment of the BRMO Integrated Remote Operations Centre (iROC) was identified as one of the strategic digitisation projects. The iROC builds on the infrastructure and goal established in the CCR but now also creates the facility and infrastructure to support the identified and future strategic digitisation areas. Building from the bottom-up with regards to integral flow of data delivering the right data, to the right person at the right time is fundamental in the iROC application. It was designed in such a manner to allow for the foreseeable inclusion of higher level business systems integrated o complete the value stream, future enhancements and continuous improvement initiatives as the journey is not finished. The current phase of the iROC will provide significant benefits to the BRMO business and the following strategic areas will be activated:

1. Multiple Mines, underground and surface processing operations, will be represented in the form of the latests AVEVA OMI solution.
2. All mining areas will be represented in the form of a production system adapted to BRMO specific requirements.
3. The surface ore transport will be represented in the form of a production system adapted to BRMO specific requirements.
4. The final product and load out area will be represented in the form of the latest AVEVA OMI solution.
5. Critical services like fire, water and power will be represented in the form of the latest AVEVA OMI solution.
6. All systems will be integrated into the OMI environment, visualised in the form of Strategic developed business value add KPl’s on a Video Wall, Alarm management and Navigation.
7. AVEVA Work Flow will be commissioned on all workstations.

The Solution

The iROC solution will creates the ability to:

1. Integrate systems and information sources to provide a holistic In-Time view across the value chain.
2. Create Situational Awareness by using integrated data sets and defined business rules, initiating actions that maximises business benefit.
3. Standardise critical workflows to minimise human error and as a result minimise business risk.

The Success

The Business benefits will be:

• By adding the integration of control room operations into the entire mine business value stream, better decision making and operational loss reduction can be achieved.
• Integration of control room operations into the entire mine business value stream will also allow us to visualise impact to business and better manage our mining as well as process operations.
• Machine and people tracking improving both safety and efficiencies.
• Access to more granular information will improve focus on the root causes of problems and variations to which better targeting of corrective actions is possible.
• In-Shift monitoring and control to respond to problems as they occur and minimising deviations to plan, which provides the opportunity to save the shift in the shift.
• Empowering supervision to make more informed decisions to reduce variability.
• Improved equipment utilisation.
• Improved response time to breakdowns implying improved availability.
• Improved mining cycle management implying more effective use of resources both human and machine.
• Improved face utilisation.
• Improved scheduling and planning.
• Platform for continuous improvement and continuous integration of future digital transformation initiatives to the iROC.