ASSMANG’s Khumani iron ore mine is an ambitious undertaking by any definition. Completed in just two years from a foundation of Kalahari sand, Khumani is well on the way of becoming a principal player on the global and competitive world of primary metal production.

Background
ASSMANG’s new Khumani iron ore mine is situated in the Northern Cape Province of South Africa and close to Sishen. The Khumani deposits are among the best iron ore resources in the country in terms of quality and quantity. Based on current reserves, a new mine producing 8,4 million tons annually would have a life in excess of 40 years and at double that capacity, a life in excess of about 25 years.

By any standards, the Khumani mine is a gigantic project. Starting in June 2006 with a budget of R4 billion, 60 000 cubic metres of structural concrete, 10 000 tons of steel, 3250 tons of plate work and 650 km of instrumentation and electrical cabling were forged together to form this mega iron ore mine in just two years.

The Khumani mine project was to be implemented in two phases:

• Phase 1 was to be completed in September 2008 and would have a capacity of 8.4 million tons of iron ore per year. Phase 1a, to be completed in December 2008, would have a capacity of 10 million tons per year.
• Phase 2 will have an annual production level of 16 million tons and is scheduled for completion in late 2010 / early 2011.
• A possible further expansion to 22 million tons per annum is presently at the feasibility study stage.

The iron ore is mined from a series of open pits by conventional drilling and blasting before being loaded onto trucks for hauling to the primary and secondary crushers. From there, the ore is transferred by conveyor to stockpiles ahead of the beneficiation plant. The run-of-mine ore is stockpiled on blending beds in two categories, ‘on-grade’ and ‘off-grade’.

The on-grade ore is crushed, washed and graded according to four size categories. The off-grade ore goes through an identical crushing, washing and screening process, followed by a jig beneficiation plant to match its chemical composition with client specifications.

There are 8 Geoscan on-line analysers installed at critical locations in the plant to monitor the chemical composition of the ore in real-time, so that immediate remedial action can be taken if the ore deviates from the chemical grade requirements.

Products are stockpiled ahead of a rapid load-out station, which has the capability to load 342 x 100-ton wagons in 8 hours – that’s one 100-ton wagon every 90 seconds. From there, the product is railed 860 kms to the port of Saldanha Bay for export.

Solution selection
DRA Mineral Projects were appointed as the Managing contractor for this project and EPCM contractor for the plant and infrastructure. DRA Mineral Projects is an engineering company that specialises in project management, engineering design and implementation and has implemented successful projects on five continents. DRA appointed system integrator Iritron for the ArchestrA System Platform 3.0 implementation portion of the project. Iritron was actively involved in the systems engineering, instrumentation design and PLC control systems aspects of the scheme.

This was a natural choice since African Rainbow Minerals and ASSMANG have standardised on AVEVA (formerly Wonderware) industrial automation solutions for all their SCADA, Historian and plant web portal requirements, and Iritron is an ArchestrA-certified system integrator that has provided AVEVA solutions and support to ASSMANG since 1999.

“To effectively monitor this huge complex, we implemented AVEVA System Platform which is based on ArchestrA technology and includes real-time Historian, the Information Server web portal, ActiveFactory real-time production performance analysis and reporting software and InTouch for the SCADA/HMI applications serving some 44 000 I/O tags,” says Iritron director Johann Pienaar. “In addition, we used the Topserver I/O Servers from Software Toolbox to communicate between the PLCs and the System Platform as well as MDT Software’s AutoSave for the change control management of all 63 Allen-Bradley ControlLogix PLCs.”

“These solutions were chosen to give us comprehensive data analysis facilities so that we could check production status and identify potential problems at any time, “ says Marius Malan, control systems supervisor, ASSMANG. “We also need continuous operation without loss of control or data as well as web access facilities and links to our planning and ERP systems. Most importantly, it all has to work through a user-friendly and intuitive operator interface.

“But these are all things we need to do now. This is a brand-new mine with a long future and we will need to adapt production to meet with market demands. That means we’ll have to expand the system as and when required and we’ll also have to do it quickly and at minimal cost.”

System implementation
Allowing for the expansion of systems at minimal cost is a cornerstone of ArchestrA technology and one of the ways this happens is through the development of standards.

Standards allow companies to define, apply and enforce their engineering criteria so that everyone works from the same page. Standards also mean that plant objects are built from templates and that changes to a single master template can be propagated to every instance of that object throughout the plant.

“The standards enforced by ArchestrA are allowing us to describe plant objects and their behaviour to reflect our experience and needs,” says Malan. “Being ASSMANG standards, they reflect our best practices and can be used by other companies in the group. The enforcement of standards ensures that all future development conforms to the norms already developed and this will save engineering time in the future, especially with the planned extensions to the plant.”

Standards don’t only apply to plant objects but also to the whole plant and to integration with other disciplines in the company. One of the key standards that helps businesses build a coherent organisation is ISA-95.

“Khumani’s plant model is based on the ISA-95 standard which was facilitated by AVEVA’s System Platform Application Server and its best practices guide supplied by IS³,” adds Pienaar. “This standard was implemented and adhered to throughout the project and will greatly facilitate integrating the system’s information with ASSMANG’s planning and ERP systems.”

Another important ArchestrA attribute that safeguards expansion at minimal cost is that of scalability. At Khumani, they know they will have to double their capacity in two years and, in ordinary conditions, this could mean some expensive system rework.

“When the time comes to expand the system, the initial work done on standards means that defining new capability will be a matter of hours rather than weeks or months,” says Pienaar. “In addition, ArchestrA has been proved to handle more than a million I/O tags and we’re currently looking at (only) about 44 000. This, together with a self-configuring historian, makes system expansion painless.”

ASSMANG’s Khumani mine, a major contributor to the company’s financial well-being, can’t afford unplanned production delays during its lengthy and productive life. The mine has to produce quality products that will be accepted worldwide in an extremely competitive market and to do that, it needs industrial information and automation equipment equal to the task.

“ArchestrA’s management of dual redundancy procedures not only guarantees delivery of data to the Historian but has saved us a significant amount of complex software engineering to resolve this critical issue, says Malan. “In fact, we no longer think “redundancy” but rather of decisions that have to be made given the wealth of available information – in other words, forget the technology and focus on the business.”

Apart from standards, scalability and system availability, ASSMANG needs a few more key attributes from a system in charge of one of its primary wealth-creating facilities and these are security and architectural freedom – which don’t mean much if said quickly but are key to versatility and freedom of choice.

“In a situation such as ours, it’s important that only authorised personnel has access to various levels of the system to make changes to set points and other parameters,” says Malan. With the System Platform, security and alarming are uniform across the entire system and we don’t have to make provision for discrete sub-systems. Of equal importance is our ability to change our mind with respect to the structure of our system and its interaction with others. ArchestrA technology gives us that choice. For example, we had to integrate with a number of third party stand-alone InTouch applications incorporated into the Metso crushers, the Bateman load-out station, a QMastor stockpile management system and a CCLAS LIMS system. Well, it all just ‘happened’”.

Conclusion
“For us, the most significant aspect of this project was that ArchestrA technology gave us a multi-user development environment that allowed us to design, develop, implement and maintain a large project in one year,” says Pienaar. “ArchestrA’s integrated development environment gave us the tools to develop complex applications without bothering unnecessarily about the details of interfacing with PLCs at one end of the spectrum and ERP systems at the other while providing the functionality to do both.”

From the start, ASSMANG’s Khumani mine is a winner, not only in terms of its rich deposits but also in terms of how it will process them. Today, no enterprise can survive without efficiency and a major contributor is how well processes can be measured and controlled. AVEVA’s System Platform will be providing Khumani mine’s managers and operators the plant intelligence they need for efficient operation far into the future.

ASSMANG’s Khumani iron ore mine is an ambitious undertaking by any definition. Completed in just two years from a foundation of Kalahari sand, Khumani is well on the way of becoming a principal player on the global and competitive world of primary metal production.

Background
ASSMANG’s new Khumani iron ore mine is situated in the Northern Cape Province of South Africa and close to Sishen. The Khumani deposits are among the best iron ore resources in the country in terms of quality and quantity. Based on current reserves, a new mine producing 8,4 million tons annually would have a life in excess of 40 years and at double that capacity, a life in excess of about 25 years.

By any standards, the Khumani mine is a gigantic project. Starting in June 2006 with a budget of R4 billion, 60 000 cubic metres of structural concrete, 10 000 tons of steel, 3250 tons of plate work and 650 km of instrumentation and electrical cabling were forged together to form this mega iron ore mine in just two years.

The Khumani mine project was to be implemented in two phases:

• Phase 1 was to be completed in September 2008 and would have a capacity of 8.4 million tons of iron ore per year. Phase 1a, to be completed in December 2008, would have a capacity of 10 million tons per year.
• Phase 2 will have an annual production level of 16 million tons and is scheduled for completion in late 2010 / early 2011.
• A possible further expansion to 22 million tons per annum is presently at the feasibility study stage.

The iron ore is mined from a series of open pits by conventional drilling and blasting before being loaded onto trucks for hauling to the primary and secondary crushers. From there, the ore is transferred by conveyor to stockpiles ahead of the beneficiation plant. The run-of-mine ore is stockpiled on blending beds in two categories, ‘on-grade’ and ‘off-grade’.

The on-grade ore is crushed, washed and graded according to four size categories. The off-grade ore goes through an identical crushing, washing and screening process, followed by a jig beneficiation plant to match its chemical composition with client specifications.

There are 8 Geoscan on-line analysers installed at critical locations in the plant to monitor the chemical composition of the ore in real-time, so that immediate remedial action can be taken if the ore deviates from the chemical grade requirements.

Products are stockpiled ahead of a rapid load-out station, which has the capability to load 342 x 100-ton wagons in 8 hours – that’s one 100-ton wagon every 90 seconds. From there, the product is railed 860 kms to the port of Saldanha Bay for export.

Solution selection
DRA Mineral Projects were appointed as the Managing contractor for this project and EPCM contractor for the plant and infrastructure. DRA Mineral Projects is an engineering company that specialises in project management, engineering design and implementation and has implemented successful projects on five continents. DRA appointed system integrator Iritron for the ArchestrA System Platform 3.0 implementation portion of the project. Iritron was actively involved in the systems engineering, instrumentation design and PLC control systems aspects of the scheme.

This was a natural choice since African Rainbow Minerals and ASSMANG have standardised on AVEVA (formerly Wonderware) industrial automation solutions for all their SCADA, Historian and plant web portal requirements, and Iritron is an ArchestrA-certified system integrator that has provided AVEVA solutions and support to ASSMANG since 1999.

“To effectively monitor this huge complex, we implemented AVEVA System Platform which is based on ArchestrA technology and includes real-time Historian, the Information Server web portal, ActiveFactory real-time production performance analysis and reporting software and InTouch for the SCADA/HMI applications serving some 44 000 I/O tags,” says Iritron director Johann Pienaar. “In addition, we used the Topserver I/O Servers from Software Toolbox to communicate between the PLCs and the System Platform as well as MDT Software’s AutoSave for the change control management of all 63 Allen-Bradley ControlLogix PLCs.”

“These solutions were chosen to give us comprehensive data analysis facilities so that we could check production status and identify potential problems at any time, “ says Marius Malan, control systems supervisor, ASSMANG. “We also need continuous operation without loss of control or data as well as web access facilities and links to our planning and ERP systems. Most importantly, it all has to work through a user-friendly and intuitive operator interface.

“But these are all things we need to do now. This is a brand-new mine with a long future and we will need to adapt production to meet with market demands. That means we’ll have to expand the system as and when required and we’ll also have to do it quickly and at minimal cost.”

System implementation
Allowing for the expansion of systems at minimal cost is a cornerstone of ArchestrA technology and one of the ways this happens is through the development of standards.

Standards allow companies to define, apply and enforce their engineering criteria so that everyone works from the same page. Standards also mean that plant objects are built from templates and that changes to a single master template can be propagated to every instance of that object throughout the plant.

“The standards enforced by ArchestrA are allowing us to describe plant objects and their behaviour to reflect our experience and needs,” says Malan. “Being ASSMANG standards, they reflect our best practices and can be used by other companies in the group. The enforcement of standards ensures that all future development conforms to the norms already developed and this will save engineering time in the future, especially with the planned extensions to the plant.”

Standards don’t only apply to plant objects but also to the whole plant and to integration with other disciplines in the company. One of the key standards that helps businesses build a coherent organisation is ISA-95.

“Khumani’s plant model is based on the ISA-95 standard which was facilitated by AVEVA’s System Platform Application Server and its best practices guide supplied by IS³,” adds Pienaar. “This standard was implemented and adhered to throughout the project and will greatly facilitate integrating the system’s information with ASSMANG’s planning and ERP systems.”

Another important ArchestrA attribute that safeguards expansion at minimal cost is that of scalability. At Khumani, they know they will have to double their capacity in two years and, in ordinary conditions, this could mean some expensive system rework.

“When the time comes to expand the system, the initial work done on standards means that defining new capability will be a matter of hours rather than weeks or months,” says Pienaar. “In addition, ArchestrA has been proved to handle more than a million I/O tags and we’re currently looking at (only) about 44 000. This, together with a self-configuring historian, makes system expansion painless.”

ASSMANG’s Khumani mine, a major contributor to the company’s financial well-being, can’t afford unplanned production delays during its lengthy and productive life. The mine has to produce quality products that will be accepted worldwide in an extremely competitive market and to do that, it needs industrial information and automation equipment equal to the task.

“ArchestrA’s management of dual redundancy procedures not only guarantees delivery of data to the Historian but has saved us a significant amount of complex software engineering to resolve this critical issue, says Malan. “In fact, we no longer think “redundancy” but rather of decisions that have to be made given the wealth of available information – in other words, forget the technology and focus on the business.”

Apart from standards, scalability and system availability, ASSMANG needs a few more key attributes from a system in charge of one of its primary wealth-creating facilities and these are security and architectural freedom – which don’t mean much if said quickly but are key to versatility and freedom of choice.

“In a situation such as ours, it’s important that only authorised personnel has access to various levels of the system to make changes to set points and other parameters,” says Malan. With the System Platform, security and alarming are uniform across the entire system and we don’t have to make provision for discrete sub-systems. Of equal importance is our ability to change our mind with respect to the structure of our system and its interaction with others. ArchestrA technology gives us that choice. For example, we had to integrate with a number of third party stand-alone InTouch applications incorporated into the Metso crushers, the Bateman load-out station, a QMastor stockpile management system and a CCLAS LIMS system. Well, it all just ‘happened’”.

Conclusion
“For us, the most significant aspect of this project was that ArchestrA technology gave us a multi-user development environment that allowed us to design, develop, implement and maintain a large project in one year,” says Pienaar. “ArchestrA’s integrated development environment gave us the tools to develop complex applications without bothering unnecessarily about the details of interfacing with PLCs at one end of the spectrum and ERP systems at the other while providing the functionality to do both.”

From the start, ASSMANG’s Khumani mine is a winner, not only in terms of its rich deposits but also in terms of how it will process them. Today, no enterprise can survive without efficiency and a major contributor is how well processes can be measured and controlled. AVEVA’s System Platform will be providing Khumani mine’s managers and operators the plant intelligence they need for efficient operation far into the future.

Exxaro has standardised on AVEVA System Platform (formerly Wonderware) as their operational technology and they preferred to use the toolset provided by IS³ to ensure an off-the-shelf technology for the information modelling tool. Also, the concept of instantiation of predefined templates suited the hierarchical requirements of the information model.

Exxaro selected Control Systems Integration (CSI) for the implementation of the project. “Prior to this project, no information modelling tool existed at the mine,” says CSI director Dries van Schalkwyk. “We used the standard off-the-shelf ArchestrA scripting environment to develop the object templates, providing a standard and open system which is easy to configure and maintain. The information modelling objects were developed in line with the S95/S88 conventions. This tool was then used to generate the configuration and availability rules for AVEVA MES Performance. We also used InTouch as the human-machine interface for the information modelling tool.”

ArchestrA-based System Platform provided CSI with the flexibility to build object model templates that could be used to define the information model and its properties to meet Exxaro’s specific needs. In addition, the system’s version control and flexibility allowed the generation of objects that enforced compliance with the best practices as well as standardisation of the methodology and business process required to define the information model.

“The object-oriented nature of ArchestrA and its template development facilities enabled us to develop flexible objects that could be reused through instantiation, thereby saving time and cost in engineering and maintenance,” says van Schalkwyk.

With every new version of an information block, an XML file is created. This allows the redeployment of the objects without dropping any information. The XML file can then be imported into an Excel template for printing which makes the approval process a lot easier.

• Reduced engineering cost
• Reduced paperwork
• Traceability and version control of information
• Automatic documentation of the information model, rules and requirements,
• Easier and shorter implementation of the business process
• Reduction in the schedule for business rule definition and approval
• Easier formulation of rules for the control system
• Automatic collation of needed information
• Ease of maintenance
• Uniform naming standard
• Empowered end user

ASSMANG’s Khumani iron ore mine is an ambitious undertaking by any definition. Completed in just two years from a foundation of Kalahari sand, Khumani is well on the way of becoming a principal player on the global and competitive world of primary metal production.

Background
ASSMANG’s new Khumani iron ore mine is situated in the Northern Cape Province of South Africa and close to Sishen. The Khumani deposits are among the best iron ore resources in the country in terms of quality and quantity. Based on current reserves, a new mine producing 8,4 million tons annually would have a life in excess of 40 years and at double that capacity, a life in excess of about 25 years.

By any standards, the Khumani mine is a gigantic project. Starting in June 2006 with a budget of R4 billion, 60 000 cubic metres of structural concrete, 10 000 tons of steel, 3250 tons of plate work and 650 km of instrumentation and electrical cabling were forged together to form this mega iron ore mine in just two years.

The Khumani mine project was to be implemented in two phases:

• Phase 1 was to be completed in September 2008 and would have a capacity of 8.4 million tons of iron ore per year. Phase 1a, to be completed in December 2008, would have a capacity of 10 million tons per year.
• Phase 2 will have an annual production level of 16 million tons and is scheduled for completion in late 2010 / early 2011.
• A possible further expansion to 22 million tons per annum is presently at the feasibility study stage.

The iron ore is mined from a series of open pits by conventional drilling and blasting before being loaded onto trucks for hauling to the primary and secondary crushers. From there, the ore is transferred by conveyor to stockpiles ahead of the beneficiation plant. The run-of-mine ore is stockpiled on blending beds in two categories, ‘on-grade’ and ‘off-grade’.

The on-grade ore is crushed, washed and graded according to four size categories. The off-grade ore goes through an identical crushing, washing and screening process, followed by a jig beneficiation plant to match its chemical composition with client specifications.

There are 8 Geoscan on-line analysers installed at critical locations in the plant to monitor the chemical composition of the ore in real-time, so that immediate remedial action can be taken if the ore deviates from the chemical grade requirements.

Products are stockpiled ahead of a rapid load-out station, which has the capability to load 342 x 100-ton wagons in 8 hours – that’s one 100-ton wagon every 90 seconds. From there, the product is railed 860 kms to the port of Saldanha Bay for export.

Solution selection
DRA Mineral Projects were appointed as the Managing contractor for this project and EPCM contractor for the plant and infrastructure. DRA Mineral Projects is an engineering company that specialises in project management, engineering design and implementation and has implemented successful projects on five continents. DRA appointed system integrator Iritron for the ArchestrA System Platform 3.0 implementation portion of the project. Iritron was actively involved in the systems engineering, instrumentation design and PLC control systems aspects of the scheme.

This was a natural choice since African Rainbow Minerals and ASSMANG have standardised on AVEVA (formerly Wonderware) industrial automation solutions for all their SCADA, Historian and plant web portal requirements, and Iritron is an ArchestrA-certified system integrator that has provided AVEVA solutions and support to ASSMANG since 1999.

“To effectively monitor this huge complex, we implemented AVEVA System Platform which is based on ArchestrA technology and includes real-time Historian, the Information Server web portal, ActiveFactory real-time production performance analysis and reporting software and InTouch for the SCADA/HMI applications serving some 44 000 I/O tags,” says Iritron director Johann Pienaar. “In addition, we used the Topserver I/O Servers from Software Toolbox to communicate between the PLCs and the System Platform as well as MDT Software’s AutoSave for the change control management of all 63 Allen-Bradley ControlLogix PLCs.”

“These solutions were chosen to give us comprehensive data analysis facilities so that we could check production status and identify potential problems at any time, “ says Marius Malan, control systems supervisor, ASSMANG. “We also need continuous operation without loss of control or data as well as web access facilities and links to our planning and ERP systems. Most importantly, it all has to work through a user-friendly and intuitive operator interface.

“But these are all things we need to do now. This is a brand-new mine with a long future and we will need to adapt production to meet with market demands. That means we’ll have to expand the system as and when required and we’ll also have to do it quickly and at minimal cost.”

System implementation
Allowing for the expansion of systems at minimal cost is a cornerstone of ArchestrA technology and one of the ways this happens is through the development of standards.

Standards allow companies to define, apply and enforce their engineering criteria so that everyone works from the same page. Standards also mean that plant objects are built from templates and that changes to a single master template can be propagated to every instance of that object throughout the plant.

“The standards enforced by ArchestrA are allowing us to describe plant objects and their behaviour to reflect our experience and needs,” says Malan. “Being ASSMANG standards, they reflect our best practices and can be used by other companies in the group. The enforcement of standards ensures that all future development conforms to the norms already developed and this will save engineering time in the future, especially with the planned extensions to the plant.”

Standards don’t only apply to plant objects but also to the whole plant and to integration with other disciplines in the company. One of the key standards that helps businesses build a coherent organisation is ISA-95.

“Khumani’s plant model is based on the ISA-95 standard which was facilitated by AVEVA’s System Platform Application Server and its best practices guide supplied by IS³,” adds Pienaar. “This standard was implemented and adhered to throughout the project and will greatly facilitate integrating the system’s information with ASSMANG’s planning and ERP systems.”

Another important ArchestrA attribute that safeguards expansion at minimal cost is that of scalability. At Khumani, they know they will have to double their capacity in two years and, in ordinary conditions, this could mean some expensive system rework.

“When the time comes to expand the system, the initial work done on standards means that defining new capability will be a matter of hours rather than weeks or months,” says Pienaar. “In addition, ArchestrA has been proved to handle more than a million I/O tags and we’re currently looking at (only) about 44 000. This, together with a self-configuring historian, makes system expansion painless.”

ASSMANG’s Khumani mine, a major contributor to the company’s financial well-being, can’t afford unplanned production delays during its lengthy and productive life. The mine has to produce quality products that will be accepted worldwide in an extremely competitive market and to do that, it needs industrial information and automation equipment equal to the task.

“ArchestrA’s management of dual redundancy procedures not only guarantees delivery of data to the Historian but has saved us a significant amount of complex software engineering to resolve this critical issue, says Malan. “In fact, we no longer think “redundancy” but rather of decisions that have to be made given the wealth of available information – in other words, forget the technology and focus on the business.”

Apart from standards, scalability and system availability, ASSMANG needs a few more key attributes from a system in charge of one of its primary wealth-creating facilities and these are security and architectural freedom – which don’t mean much if said quickly but are key to versatility and freedom of choice.

“In a situation such as ours, it’s important that only authorised personnel has access to various levels of the system to make changes to set points and other parameters,” says Malan. With the System Platform, security and alarming are uniform across the entire system and we don’t have to make provision for discrete sub-systems. Of equal importance is our ability to change our mind with respect to the structure of our system and its interaction with others. ArchestrA technology gives us that choice. For example, we had to integrate with a number of third party stand-alone InTouch applications incorporated into the Metso crushers, the Bateman load-out station, a QMastor stockpile management system and a CCLAS LIMS system. Well, it all just ‘happened’”.

Conclusion
“For us, the most significant aspect of this project was that ArchestrA technology gave us a multi-user development environment that allowed us to design, develop, implement and maintain a large project in one year,” says Pienaar. “ArchestrA’s integrated development environment gave us the tools to develop complex applications without bothering unnecessarily about the details of interfacing with PLCs at one end of the spectrum and ERP systems at the other while providing the functionality to do both.”

From the start, ASSMANG’s Khumani mine is a winner, not only in terms of its rich deposits but also in terms of how it will process them. Today, no enterprise can survive without efficiency and a major contributor is how well processes can be measured and controlled. AVEVA’s System Platform will be providing Khumani mine’s managers and operators the plant intelligence they need for efficient operation far into the future.

ASSMANG’s Khumani iron ore mine is an ambitious undertaking by any definition. Completed in just two years from a foundation of Kalahari sand, Khumani is well on the way of becoming a principal player on the global and competitive world of primary metal production.

Background
ASSMANG’s new Khumani iron ore mine is situated in the Northern Cape Province of South Africa and close to Sishen. The Khumani deposits are among the best iron ore resources in the country in terms of quality and quantity. Based on current reserves, a new mine producing 8,4 million tons annually would have a life in excess of 40 years and at double that capacity, a life in excess of about 25 years.

By any standards, the Khumani mine is a gigantic project. Starting in June 2006 with a budget of R4 billion, 60 000 cubic metres of structural concrete, 10 000 tons of steel, 3250 tons of plate work and 650 km of instrumentation and electrical cabling were forged together to form this mega iron ore mine in just two years.

The Khumani mine project was to be implemented in two phases:

• Phase 1 was to be completed in September 2008 and would have a capacity of 8.4 million tons of iron ore per year. Phase 1a, to be completed in December 2008, would have a capacity of 10 million tons per year.
• Phase 2 will have an annual production level of 16 million tons and is scheduled for completion in late 2010 / early 2011.
• A possible further expansion to 22 million tons per annum is presently at the feasibility study stage.

The iron ore is mined from a series of open pits by conventional drilling and blasting before being loaded onto trucks for hauling to the primary and secondary crushers. From there, the ore is transferred by conveyor to stockpiles ahead of the beneficiation plant. The run-of-mine ore is stockpiled on blending beds in two categories, ‘on-grade’ and ‘off-grade’.

The on-grade ore is crushed, washed and graded according to four size categories. The off-grade ore goes through an identical crushing, washing and screening process, followed by a jig beneficiation plant to match its chemical composition with client specifications.

There are 8 Geoscan on-line analysers installed at critical locations in the plant to monitor the chemical composition of the ore in real-time, so that immediate remedial action can be taken if the ore deviates from the chemical grade requirements.

Products are stockpiled ahead of a rapid load-out station, which has the capability to load 342 x 100-ton wagons in 8 hours – that’s one 100-ton wagon every 90 seconds. From there, the product is railed 860 kms to the port of Saldanha Bay for export.

Solution selection
DRA Mineral Projects were appointed as the Managing contractor for this project and EPCM contractor for the plant and infrastructure. DRA Mineral Projects is an engineering company that specialises in project management, engineering design and implementation and has implemented successful projects on five continents. DRA appointed system integrator Iritron for the ArchestrA System Platform 3.0 implementation portion of the project. Iritron was actively involved in the systems engineering, instrumentation design and PLC control systems aspects of the scheme.

This was a natural choice since African Rainbow Minerals and ASSMANG have standardised on AVEVA (formerly Wonderware) industrial automation solutions for all their SCADA, Historian and plant web portal requirements, and Iritron is an ArchestrA-certified system integrator that has provided AVEVA solutions and support to ASSMANG since 1999.

“To effectively monitor this huge complex, we implemented AVEVA System Platform which is based on ArchestrA technology and includes real-time Historian, the Information Server web portal, ActiveFactory real-time production performance analysis and reporting software and InTouch for the SCADA/HMI applications serving some 44 000 I/O tags,” says Iritron director Johann Pienaar. “In addition, we used the Topserver I/O Servers from Software Toolbox to communicate between the PLCs and the System Platform as well as MDT Software’s AutoSave for the change control management of all 63 Allen-Bradley ControlLogix PLCs.”

“These solutions were chosen to give us comprehensive data analysis facilities so that we could check production status and identify potential problems at any time, “ says Marius Malan, control systems supervisor, ASSMANG. “We also need continuous operation without loss of control or data as well as web access facilities and links to our planning and ERP systems. Most importantly, it all has to work through a user-friendly and intuitive operator interface.

“But these are all things we need to do now. This is a brand-new mine with a long future and we will need to adapt production to meet with market demands. That means we’ll have to expand the system as and when required and we’ll also have to do it quickly and at minimal cost.”

System implementation
Allowing for the expansion of systems at minimal cost is a cornerstone of ArchestrA technology and one of the ways this happens is through the development of standards.

Standards allow companies to define, apply and enforce their engineering criteria so that everyone works from the same page. Standards also mean that plant objects are built from templates and that changes to a single master template can be propagated to every instance of that object throughout the plant.

“The standards enforced by ArchestrA are allowing us to describe plant objects and their behaviour to reflect our experience and needs,” says Malan. “Being ASSMANG standards, they reflect our best practices and can be used by other companies in the group. The enforcement of standards ensures that all future development conforms to the norms already developed and this will save engineering time in the future, especially with the planned extensions to the plant.”

Standards don’t only apply to plant objects but also to the whole plant and to integration with other disciplines in the company. One of the key standards that helps businesses build a coherent organisation is ISA-95.

“Khumani’s plant model is based on the ISA-95 standard which was facilitated by AVEVA’s System Platform Application Server and its best practices guide supplied by IS³,” adds Pienaar. “This standard was implemented and adhered to throughout the project and will greatly facilitate integrating the system’s information with ASSMANG’s planning and ERP systems.”

Another important ArchestrA attribute that safeguards expansion at minimal cost is that of scalability. At Khumani, they know they will have to double their capacity in two years and, in ordinary conditions, this could mean some expensive system rework.

“When the time comes to expand the system, the initial work done on standards means that defining new capability will be a matter of hours rather than weeks or months,” says Pienaar. “In addition, ArchestrA has been proved to handle more than a million I/O tags and we’re currently looking at (only) about 44 000. This, together with a self-configuring historian, makes system expansion painless.”

ASSMANG’s Khumani mine, a major contributor to the company’s financial well-being, can’t afford unplanned production delays during its lengthy and productive life. The mine has to produce quality products that will be accepted worldwide in an extremely competitive market and to do that, it needs industrial information and automation equipment equal to the task.

“ArchestrA’s management of dual redundancy procedures not only guarantees delivery of data to the Historian but has saved us a significant amount of complex software engineering to resolve this critical issue, says Malan. “In fact, we no longer think “redundancy” but rather of decisions that have to be made given the wealth of available information – in other words, forget the technology and focus on the business.”

Apart from standards, scalability and system availability, ASSMANG needs a few more key attributes from a system in charge of one of its primary wealth-creating facilities and these are security and architectural freedom – which don’t mean much if said quickly but are key to versatility and freedom of choice.

“In a situation such as ours, it’s important that only authorised personnel has access to various levels of the system to make changes to set points and other parameters,” says Malan. With the System Platform, security and alarming are uniform across the entire system and we don’t have to make provision for discrete sub-systems. Of equal importance is our ability to change our mind with respect to the structure of our system and its interaction with others. ArchestrA technology gives us that choice. For example, we had to integrate with a number of third party stand-alone InTouch applications incorporated into the Metso crushers, the Bateman load-out station, a QMastor stockpile management system and a CCLAS LIMS system. Well, it all just ‘happened’”.

Conclusion
“For us, the most significant aspect of this project was that ArchestrA technology gave us a multi-user development environment that allowed us to design, develop, implement and maintain a large project in one year,” says Pienaar. “ArchestrA’s integrated development environment gave us the tools to develop complex applications without bothering unnecessarily about the details of interfacing with PLCs at one end of the spectrum and ERP systems at the other while providing the functionality to do both.”

From the start, ASSMANG’s Khumani mine is a winner, not only in terms of its rich deposits but also in terms of how it will process them. Today, no enterprise can survive without efficiency and a major contributor is how well processes can be measured and controlled. AVEVA’s System Platform will be providing Khumani mine’s managers and operators the plant intelligence they need for efficient operation far into the future.

Goals
The integration of a vast and geographically distributed information network to support regional and central decision-making
Remote measurement of mission-critical variables such as water flow and quantity, pH, turbidity, chlorine levels, conductivity, reservoir levels and pipeline pressures
Calculation of water balances in order to assist with the identification of problem areas, faulty instruments as well as the calculation of the network’s efficiency in future

Solutions and Products
AVEVA System Platform
AVEVA InTouch
AVEVA Historian

Results
A single and integrated business view and control of Rand Water’s extensive network assets through the integration of its insular control systems

Background
Established in 1903, Rand Water is the largest water utility in Africa, delivering on average 3.5 million tons (3500 million litres) of some of the purest drinking water in the world to approximately 11 million people every day through local authorities, large industries and mines. The success of such an operation depends on the smooth running of a vast distribution network spanning 18 000 km2 plus 13 000 km2 of which is shared with other water utilities. With an annual turnover of more than R3 billion and assets in excess of R5 billion, customer satisfaction through the effective management, control and utilisation of its water delivery infrastructure is top of the agenda at Rand Water.

The Rand Water network consists of 2 major water treatment sites, 13 booster pumping stations, 3000 km of pipelines, 32 storage reservoirs and approximately 1500 customer meters (e.g. municipalities).

This network is supervised by a wide range of control systems including a variety of PLCs, SCADA systems, meters as well as a diverse range of data networks and protocols.

Rand Water’s province-sized “shop floor” required an approach that would help it integrate control and collate information in order to optimise the use of existing assets and streamline infrastructure utilisation. The time had come to aggregate the information from the distributed databases and to make this information available to operational management for monitoring the whole operation of bulk water supply throughout Rand Water’s network at a glance. This was the start of the ArchestrA-based Rand Water Control Centre project.

The project goals include:

• Remote measurement of mission-critical variables such as water flow and quantity, pH, turbidity, chlorine levels, conductivity, reservoir levels and pipeline pressures.
• Calculation of water balances in order to assist with the identification of problem areas, faulty instruments as well as the calculation of the network’s efficiency in future.
• Central monitoring of water quantity and quality
• Central overview / dashboard of operations
• Central alarming and reporting
• Integration of a variety of disparate systems
• Linking up systems and meters not yet on the LAN/WAN

‘Due to its scope, the Control Centre project is more of a journey rather than a project,’ says Les Lange of Rand Water. ‘What appealed to us about Wonderware’s ArchestrA, was that it provided the “Galaxy” concept for the unification of networks and information repositories through a single transparent tag name database. Although they are geographically distributed over the whole of Gauteng and beyond, we can now treat all our sites as a single entity or Galaxy. This will eliminate islands of information and present us with a unified and centralised information repository that is available to all. This approach is also leading to an easier development and deployment of standards through a central control point that is also facilitating software change management. The other reasons we chose Wonderware are their large installed base both locally and world-wide as well as the strong local support and availability of skills.’

Most KPIs defined at the start of the project are now available, the various disparate systems are being integrated and the operations staff are very satisfied with developments.

‘We’ve found integration with ArchestrA to be easy,’ says Dries van Schalkwyk of Control Systems Integration. ‘DDE, Suitelink, OPC … anything goes. The ArchestrA environment is also helping to reduce engineering costs through the development, deployment and maintenance of standards such as the S88 naming convention. These now apply to the whole organisation.’

ArchestrA’s use of object technology means that the information, control, alarming and other criteria for plant items such as pumps and valves is defined in a template. If a change is required, only the template needs to be edited and this change will then automatically propagate to every instance of that item in the network. ‘This makes it easy to define and maintain standards and also reduces engineering costs when installing a new plant or maintaining an existing plant,’ adds Lange.

The Rand Water ArchestrA area model (Figure 3) consists of geographical areas and sites (treatment sites, booster pumping stations, pipelines and storage reservoirs) as well as distribution zones (pipeline service areas).

‘We see ArchestrA as an excellent solution for our needs,’ says Lange. ‘It maps well to our primary objective of an integrated and unified “shop floor” and provides the necessary infrastructure to safeguard our extensive existing investments and assets.’

Goals
The implementation of an enterprise-wide power control solution that would meet Sibanye-Stillwater’s geographically-distributed needs

Challenges

• A singular application that spanned across and satisfied the needs of all Sibanye-Stillwater’s operations
• Perform automated load shifting
• Automated load clipping
• Centrally-managed control of the system, its equipment, and its schedules
• Continue operation in spite of network outages

Results

• The SCADA system is now a single application spanning across all of Sibanye-Stillwater’s operations
• Management has access to all data and information across the enterprise
• Centralised energy control
• Flexible system
• More deployments of this successful solution into new mines

Solutions & Products

• AVEVA System Platform
• AVEVA InTouch
• AVEVA Historian
• AUVESY-MDT AutoSave for System Platform

South Africa and Zimbabwe
A key cost factor in mining is electrical energy and Sibanye-Stillwater’s extensive, geographically-dispersed operations involved in the mining of gold, platinum and uranium, uses a lot of it. So much so that they saw the need for a holistic, enterprise-wide approach to the problem to replace the discrete and numerous solutions that had evolved over the years.

Background
Sibanye purchased a number of mines, each of which had evolved their own solution to the power management problem over many years. In fact, all these solutions added up to no less than 39 stand-alone applications across the company’s operations.

“Multiple energy control projects at the different operations resulted in many proprietary third-party systems being used for scheduling,” says P.J. Jansen van Rensburg, ICT Manager, Networks and Engineering Systems, Sibanye-Stillwater. “Any energy control schedule configuration was done in isolation of the others and their inflexibility caused some contradictory control problems such as different priorities seen from the perspective of the solution vendors – even at the same site. This resulted in management not having access to all applications and their information.”

But the problems didn’t end there. Sibanye-Stillwater’s production activities were not synchronised with Eskom’s tariff structures with regard to load shifting (moving the load demand to non-peak times) and load clipping (limiting the load to set limits). And lastly, there was no standardisation across all 32 SCADA systems in use at the time.

Implementation
Sibanye-Stillwater launched an initiative to implement an enterprise-wide power control module that would meet the following criteria:

Consist of a singular application that spanned across and satisfied the needs of all Sibanye-Stillwater’s operations
Perform automated load shifting
Maintain usage within limits at all times (automated load clipping)
Provide centrally-managed control of the system, its equipment and its schedules
Continue operation in spite of network outages
“We chose a decentralised infrastructure model, which meant that, in the event of a hardware failure, only the local site would be affected while each Sibanye operation, shaft and PLC would be able to run independently in case of a communication failure,” says van Rensburg. “The solution that ticked all the boxes was [AVEVA’s] System Platform.”

“To better understand what the total power control module needed to do, it’s important to understand Eskom’s two-part tariff system,” says van Rensburg. “This consists of Load Shifting which means scheduling machinery to either stop working altogether or run unloaded during Eskom’s peak periods (18:00 to 20:00 in summer and 17:00 to 19:00 in winter – 2.5 times the rate for non-peak consumption). Then there’s Load Clipping which is done by unloading machinery during Eskom’s peak and standard tariff periods as per set targets.”

So schedules were created, configured and activated to cope with Load Shifting while targets were set and algorithms created and deployed to handle the Load Clipping aspect of power control. “Because of its real-time nature, we still can’t do Load Clipping during network failure,” explains van Rensburg. “But Load Shifting is no longer a problem because a register for the next 20 operations is programmed into the PLC every few seconds which means that it can continue to independently shift loads for up to a week if necessary.”

“Standardisation is crucial to operator efficiency it they change plants but it also provides a standardised communication ‘language’ and understanding between everyone involved who all have access to this production information. This lets them benchmark and compare their accomplishments to other plants because they all share a common standard for performance,” says van Rensburg.

Results

• The current SCADA system is now a single application spanning across all of Sibanye-Stillwater’s operations.
• Management now has access to all data and information across the enterprise.
• All energy control projects can be controlled centrally and projects are underway to move to central control.
• This system is flexible enough to allow for continuous improvements and savings.
• Sibanye has acquired more mines and the system is being successfully implemented into these new ventures

About Sibanye-Stillwater
Sibanye-Stillwater owns and operates high-quality gold and platinum operations in South Africa – consolidated into one Group with one vision and strategy. The long-term success of Sibanye-Stillwater as a business and as a responsible corporate citizen is dependent on all stakeholders working together as one.

Goals

• Meet customer needs while looking after network safety
• Reduce meter reading time and costs
• Improve knowledge of imported and delivered gas as well as network status in real time

Challenges

How to implement GSM-based data acquisition technology at remote locations with power and security problems

Results

• Considerable reduction in personnel time and travelling costs
• Accurate monitoring of pressures to look after customer requirements and the network’s safety
• Reduction in maintenance personnel and effort
• Accurate reconciliation of imported and exported gas
• Speedy response to faults/issues
• Real-time knowledge of network health and status
• The system will be expanded to detect leaks and illegal taps

Solutions & Products

• System Platform
• Historian
• Historian Client
• InTouch

Johannesburg, Gauteng, South Africa
With a “shop floor” covering the greater Johannesburg metropolitan area, Egoli Gas had an understandable problem reading their meters and getting a grip on the true status of their vast pipe network. Today, manual data collection is a thing of the past and Egoli Gas can do a better job of looking after its customers by meeting their needs in real time.

Background
Prior to the installation of this new system, Egoli Gas personnel would drive to 7200 gas meters in a 1800 km-long network covering a large portion of the greater Johannesburg metropolitan area, They would log consumption data for processing in Excel from which very basic reports were generated for management.

This entirely manual process was prone to human error, unsynchronised meter readings and further time delays in generating the reports. The result was an inefficient operation and delayed response to issues affecting gas delivery to Egoli Gas’ clients.

“As a utility company with many important customers, our challenges were numerous,” says Emmanuel Matodzi, Projects and Planning Engineer at Egoli Gas. “How do we read all the 7500 meters in our network or how do we ensure that none of the sectors in our network is being starved of gas or is experiencing low pressure – especially in times of sudden demand from our clients who use gas for power generation during power load shedding?”

But that’s only half the story. At any moment in time, Egoli Gas couldn’t readily reconcile the volume of gas they bought from SASOL with the amount supplied to their customers until the tedious and time-consuming process of manual data collection was completed – so reducing the time and cost of personnel travelling their vast network had to be addressed.

And the list goes on: How could Egoli Gas be proactive in pre-empting unwanted high pressures in their ageing network which isn’t only undesirable for the network but especially for their customers whose equipment may be designed to cope with 3 rather than 25 kPa? How can the company address the problem of detecting theft and leaks? Then there was the real need to know at all times how much gas capacity was in reserve as well as the health of the entire network.

This was all about bringing decades-old but vital energy technology into the 21st century with all its attendant problems and challenges. What’s more, whatever solution was chosen could not rely on human intervention and had to be entirely reliable since the profitability of Egoli Gas and the satisfaction of its customers depended on it.

Egoli Gas took a bold decision to address all these issues once and for all. Their goal was to develop a gas network monitoring solution using solar-powered GSM data acquisition technology and to log the data automatically in order to provide reports on gas distribution and consumption – all in real time while also addressing the issues of power availability at remote locations as well as that of vandal-proofing.

Implementation
Egoli Gas selected AVEVA-certified system integrator Systems Anywhere for the implementation of this landmark project who decided to build on Egoli Gas’ existing Wonderware-based industrial information infrastructure.

Systems Anywhere designed a cost-effective solar-powered, vandal-proof logging station (Smartoos) for use at all measuring nodes to log gas volume, pressure and temperature in order to determine the gas supply conditions at all these delivery points. Readings are transmitted via private APN every 2 minutes to the Cottesloe “Starfish” with a Port-Forwarding configuration.

“This alone resulted in huge savings in terms of personnel and travelling costs as well as time,” says Matodzi. “In fact, we estimate that time and cost savings to be about 95% with 100% improvement in the quality of data – not only in its accuracy but also in its near-real-time delivery. The system also provides every department with the information they need. For example, account managers now know precisely what their key accounts are doing and can advise them accordingly and our own accountants know precisely how much gas we’re importing and distributing.”

The first glimpse into what’s happening in Egoli Gas’ network is the overview of its 24 governor stations whose job it is to reduce mainline pressure to what consumers need – like a step-down transformer in an electrical network. This InTouch screen provides a concise view of current conditions and alarms. The elimination of all manual data collection lets Egoli Gas personnel concentrate on improving customer service through the early and rapid detection and identification of irregularities in the gas distribution network before they become a problem for end-users. This is especially applicable to those users who use gas for power generation.

“This information also allows us to look after our ageing pipe network to ensure that pressure doesn’t exceed 25 kPa but is maintained above 16 kPa on the high-pressure mains,” says Matodzi. “This level of data acquisition and analysis means that Egoli Gas personnel can focus their experience and expertise on real issues and on maintenance rather than data collection. “

About Egoli Gas (Pty) Ltd
Egoli Gas is a natural gas reticulator based in Johannesburg and servicing more than 7 500 domestic, central water heating, commercial and industrial businesses in the Johannesburg area. The company operates an 1800 km network dating back to the company’s origin in 1892.

The service offers environmentally-friendly, safe, reliable and energy-efficient natural gas. The company’s commitment to their customers’ energy-efficient, low-carbon lifestyle ensures an uninterrupted flow of natural gas ready to use when it’s needed, safely.

Egoli Gas acquires natural gas from Sasol which is stored at a secure facility in Langlaagte where it is carefully monitored and controlled.

The gas is reticulated to Egoli Gas’ Cottesloe premises where it’s stored in low pressure holders before being reticulated to homes and businesses across the city.

For domestic use, Egoli Gas is located in many of the more established Johannesburg suburbs; however, the pipeline extends even further for its commercial and industrial customers.

ASSMANG’s Khumani iron ore mine is an ambitious undertaking by any definition. Completed in just two years from a foundation of Kalahari sand, Khumani is well on the way to becoming a principal player in the global and competitive world of primary metal production.

Background

ASSMANG’s Khumani iron ore mine is situated in the Northern Cape Province of South Africa and close to Sishen. The Khumani deposits are among the best iron ore resources in the country in terms of quality and quantity. Based on current reserves, a new mine producing 8,4 million tons annually would have a life in excess of 40 years and at double that capacity, a life in excess of about 25 years.

System Integrator Iritron was contracted by DRA Mineral Projects (Pty) Ltd during the initial (2008 greenfields) ASSMANG Khumani project to take responsibility for the implementation of the overall SCADA  (Supervisory, Control and Data Acquisition) system using the AVEVA System Platform (based on ArchestrA Technology) and to integrate into the DRA project C&I team responsible for the systems engineering, instrumentation design,  PLC control system design, network design, implementation and commissioning for the plant.

Expansion project

For the mine’s expansion Project, ASSMANG again appointed DRA Mineral Projects as the Managing Contractor for the project and Iritron was again contracted by DRA to implement the extensions to the already-installed AVEVA System Platform (formerly Wonderware).

Iritron is a certified AVEVA System Platform integrator and has a long track record with ASSMANG and extensive knowledge of their standards and requirements. To date, Iritron has successfully implemented five large ArchestrA projects ranging from the Northern Cape to the United States and the company is currently busy with another four projects. Iritron is also actively involved in the Beta and systems testing of current and future releases of AVEVA System Platform.

“One of the main advantages of AVEVA System Platform is its scalability, flexibility and ease of expansion once standards and templates have been developed for a specific implementation,” says Iritron director Johann Pienaar. “In this case, the standards and templates that were developed during the initial phase of the project could be re-used for all the new plant sections.”

In terms of hardware, the existing System Platform was expanded by adding an additional pair of redundant Application Object Servers and six additional InTouch View Nodes in the new plant sections – King Primary Crushing, 2nd Load-Out Station and the Jig Plant Extension. No other hardware additions were required – the existing servers and networks had more than sufficient spare capacity in terms of processing power and licensing.

In terms of software development, the effort put in during the definition and development of the standards and templates during the initial project finally paid off. “All that was required was to create new instances of the existing templates (motors, valves, conveyors, crushers, screens, etc.) for each piece of equipment that had to be added,” says Pienaar. “No testing and integration were required, seeing as these templates had already been thoroughly tested. The same applied to the PLC programmes.”

Once the object instances had been created (exports from the FDES instrumentation design software and CSV imports were used to automate this process in both System Platform and in RSLogix5000), the new mimics were created by dragging and dropping the associated object graphics on to the mimic pages and adding the static detail. The graphics and animation form part of the object templates, so no additional configuration or testing was required.

The size of the Khumani Expansion Project is about 50% of the original project, but the SCADA development took less than 10% of the original development thanks to the standards enforcement of the underlying ArchestrA technology. The savings in time will be even more pronounced during commissioning.

“We are thankful for AVEVA’s ArchestrA technology because its developers obviously understood our very real needs and built an environment that allows us to grow painlessly, quickly and to the benefit of our clients,” concludes Pienaar.

Benefits

• Using standards developed during the initial phase of the project greatly reduced engineering time
• Thoroughly tested existing templates could be redeployed with confidence
• The System Platform provided all the necessary scalability, flexibility and ease of expansion the project requiredConclusion
  Proof positive that the bottom line is impacted positively when industrial production solutions “understand” the long-term view rather than cater for the immediate fix. Based on soaring world demand, it’s predictable that Khumani will continue to expand and continue to hone its production processes to maximise profits.Through design, the solutions now in place “understand” that this is the norm of today’s industrial marketplace and will continue to deliver results that keep pace with the inventiveness and ingenuity of their owners. After all is said and done, it’s results that count – not promises.

ASSMANG’s Khumani iron ore mine is an ambitious undertaking by any definition. Completed in just two years from a foundation of Kalahari sand, Khumani is well on the way to becoming a principal player in the global and competitive world of primary metal production.

Background

ASSMANG’s Khumani iron ore mine is situated in the Northern Cape Province of South Africa and close to Sishen. The Khumani deposits are among the best iron ore resources in the country in terms of quality and quantity. Based on current reserves, a new mine producing 8,4 million tons annually would have a life in excess of 40 years and at double that capacity, a life in excess of about 25 years.

System Integrator Iritron was contracted by DRA Mineral Projects (Pty) Ltd during the initial (2008 greenfields) ASSMANG Khumani project to take responsibility for the implementation of the overall SCADA  (Supervisory, Control and Data Acquisition) system using the AVEVA System Platform (based on ArchestrA Technology) and to integrate into the DRA project C&I team responsible for the systems engineering, instrumentation design,  PLC control system design, network design, implementation and commissioning for the plant.

“We are planning to produce more than five million tons a year eventually from our mining operations,” says Sechaba Letaba, the senior general manager of BRMO. “As production is ramped up at Nchwaning, the existing surface beneficiation plant was identified as a bottleneck as it did not provide sufficient surface crushing, screening and washing capacity”.

Accordingly system integrator Iritron was appointed as a role player of the EPCM team together with TWP to design, procure and manage the construction of ASSMANG’s Nchwaning III Beneficiation Plant. Alwyn Rautenbach, Group Managing Director of IRITRON, expressed his gratitude to ASSMANG for their continued faith in Iritron to deliver quality EC&I turnkey solutions. He summed up the project by stating that the company had “once again supplied ASSMANG with a quality automation solution that is within budget, on time, easy to maintain and which meets all their operating requirements.”

The new beneficiation plant sources ore from either Nchwaning II or Nchwaning III mines which is placed in one of four ±2500-ton silos depending on the customer/grade required. Via a conveyor system, the ore then goes through a series of crushing, washing and sampling processes and is sized and graded into load-out bins in accordance with various customer requirements. The new beneficiation plant provides for a production changeover from low to high-grade ore in less than twenty minutes.

Iritron tied into the existing 22KV reticulation with two new 22kV distribution stations. The motor control centres (MCCs) were not only designed but also supplied by the Iritron group. The quality up-front design work necessitated very few on-site modifications resulting in a very neat racking and cabling installation where locations are far apart due to the nature of the operations. The instrumentation design was done on Dessoft’s engineering software 1Des and based on remote I/O distribution in the field and cabled to I/O collection points in the MCCs.

Iritron’s brief was to develop an automation solution based on best practices and standards that also cater for future expansion. A leading-edge PLC/SCADA solution was offered that leverages the latest features of Schneider Electric’s Unity Pro v4.0 collaborative engineering software and AVEVA System Platform based on ArchestrA technology, supplied by IS³. The corresponding ArchestrA and Schneider Unity DDT templates were developed for the project and these provide the platform for standardisation, simplified coding and accelerated engineering. AVEVA’s Historian provides the required historical logging, trending and reporting functionality while Information Server web portal allows management and other data clients to view the plant mimics remotely and to keep an eye on continuously-updated production reports. The reports relay real-time and accumulated production throughput and capacity utilisation on a per-shift and daily basis.

At the specific request of Black Rock, Iritron’s Operations Director André Roeloffze, was appointed as the commissioning manager for the new plant on behalf of the mine. The plant was handed over for production in May 2010.

Goals

• Enhancing production, management reporting and business efficiency
• Inventory optimisation
• Improving plant availability (OEE)
• Real-time production information, measured per line and per machine
• Reducing manual reporting and ensuring data integrity through formal production accounting
• Enabling material traceability
• Facilitating production flow without compromising control or security
• Keeping inventory off the shop floor

Solutions and Products

• AVEVA System Platform
• InTouch
• Historian
• Skelta BPM
• MES (Performance)
• Top Server from Software Toolbox

Challenges
Overcoming doubts on implementing a new solution – at least in South Africa (Skelta BPM) without local reference sites

Results

• Enhanced production, performance reporting
• Easy enhancements and the flexibility to cope with changes
• Accurate reporting of up and down times (data integrity)
• OEE reporting helps optimise plant availability and performance
• Improved inventory optimisation
• Real-time production information measured per line and per machine
• Limited manual reporting
• Ease of integration with other systems (ERP)

Background
Gauteng, South Africa − Struggling with a manufacturing information management system that was installed in 1992 and last updated in 2000, SA Mint decided that it was time for a radical upgrade that would involve the latest MES and EMI technologies and approaches commensurate with the company’s product excellence and world-wide reputation.

The manufacturing process at SA Mint is characterised by a need for efficiency, security and tight production accounting – not to mention consistent product quality and dependable automation. The company bears a unique responsibility for delivering high quality products consistently, on time and in large volumes. This is an environment that has little or no tolerance for unreliable performance or lack of control and which has to meet the budget constraints of 21st century economics.

The production process is quite complex and has a large number of steps that must be followed precisely to make a single coin but, although this was already being handled, the real problem lay with management information – there wasn’t any. This meant that business continuity management couldn’t be guaranteed and reporting was a tedious business which was seldom on time to be effective.

Other concerns were that the existing solution couldn’t be integrated with others, depended on only one person for support and was based on very old operating and database management systems as well as an ancient technology infrastructure that was no longer supported.

“In 2005, a decision was made to completely overhaul and enhance our factory systems,” says Lungile Binza, CIO at the South African Mint Company Ltd. “This was the start of project Pelo – a Sesotho word for “heart” as this would be the heart of our operations. The plant needed a system that would provide material traceability, ensure data integrity and provide a solution that is flexible enough to accommodate changes in our manufacturing environment. The system would also have to assist with inventory optimisation by providing information about the availability and location of inventory items. We were looking forward to far greater visibility into our KPIs while the system facilitated production flow without compromising control or security at the same time as providing real-time production information including OEE.”

In 2010/1, after a false start, project Pelo was put back on track based on SA Mint’s business needs rather than the process requirements. “At the time of this restart, the MES workflow technology was brand new and there were no referral sites in South Africa. We knew that we couldn’t tolerate anything going wrong and adopting this technology was initially considered too risky and the proposals were rejected. We were not going to have a ‘guinea-pig experience’,” continues Binza. “But a top-level presentation by Wonderware Southern Africa (now IS³) showed us their commitment to a future where model-driven MES and workflow management would become the norm because that’s what customers wanted. This new paradigm would be introduced and supported, and training would be provided just as had happened with the rest of AVEVA’s product range, supplied by IS³. In fact, because of the needed human interaction and decision-making at the MES level, it soon became apparent that the integration of workflows would become the norm rather than the exception. Even so, the board of SA Mint insisted on introducing a system of checks and balances – but more about that later.”

Implementation
In 2012, Pelo phase 3 was started and the first step was to address the needs of the Plating Area whose business objectives included:

• Allowing the business to schedule any denomination through the plating area at any time
• Assisting the production team with the on-time delivery of products through planning methodologies such as theory of constraints (ToC) and lean manufacturing practices.
• Manufacturing good-quality products.
• Providing production management, the information to reduce manufacturing costs.
• Replacing the current factory and material handling systems
  Interfacing with other systems such as the ERP and material handling systems
• Next in line were the Plating Area’s operational requirements:
• Promoting the flow of material through in-line processing,
• Improving the traceability of the material by ensuring that, in case of a breakdown of the upstream equipment, there is off-loading capacity of the work in process at both the QA stations and the furnace exit. This provision will be made by having off-loading bins which are permanently in line
• Eliminating storing material on the shop floor
• Minimising manual movement of the material in and out of the line and across the plating lines (i.e. furnace and polishing).
• Creating customer value and continually reducing waste
• Embedding 5S principles and improving housekeeping

SA Mint selected system integrator Systems Anywhere Coastal to assist with the implementation because of the company’s track record of successfully supplying multi-level decision-support solutions to many companies in the mining and manufacturing industries.

“We needed to track production, downtimes, shifts and running times as well as monitor the status of machine and production weights,” says Paut Kotze, Software Engineer at Systems Anywhere Coastal. “All development had to comply with SA Mint’s standards and quality criteria and this was especially important in the case of validating manual entries through the 14 InTouch HMI stations. These display production input, output and stoppages in real time. We also developed our own security features for linking to other systems.”

AVEVA’s System Platform, host to all applications including the model-driven MES and business intelligence solutions, provided easier system maintenance and the management of standards through its centralised Integrated Development Environment. “By providing a single source for software management, the definition, deployment and maintenance of standards as well as the integration of third-party solutions, AVEVA System Platform justified its reputation as ‘the industry’s operating system’,” says Kotze.

Behind the scenes – the new MES. The dialogue box is the user interface regarding the KPIs of transfer notes. This is linked to a user-defined human-level process including responsibilities and responses being managed by Skelta BPM (now AVEVA Work Tasks) in the background, ensuring completion of all fields irrespective of the data sources to be accessed.

System development took about three months with a further two months of extremely thorough integration testing. Commissioning took two weeks and another two weeks was spent monitoring the interaction between the operators and the system. This was followed by two months of factory acceptance testing and finally a two-month stabilisation period.

Skelta BPM (AVEVA Work Tasks) is central to the implementation because it manages the workflow between people – it could be considered as process control at the human level. “No longer did we have to write multiple scripts in order to check if something had been done,” says Binza. “The application gave us drag-and-drop simplicity so that we could easily develop and maintain workflows while referencing various databases as well as the SCADA systems. It helped us enforce business rules and standards as well as traceability of users and production.”

The Enterprise Manufacturing Intelligence (EMI) aspect of the project is not only helping SA Mint collate valuable decision and management support information but also provides access to the areas of mobile reporting, analysis and control as well as cloud computing and the ability to make sense out of big data. The next challenge for SA Mint is the design and implementation of phase 4 which will include the final products area.

But had it all been worthwhile? Had the project provided SA Mint with real business benefits? As mentioned earlier, on acceptance of this project, the board and steering committee of SA Mint insisted on verifiable checks and balances and appointed an independent auditing company to verify any business benefits the mint had realised through this exercise. Their findings are shown in the table below.

Benefits

• Enhanced production, performance reporting and the realisation of business goals
• Easy enhancements and the flexibility to cope with changes in the manufacturing environment
• Accurate reporting of up and down times (data integrity)
• OEE reporting helps optimise plant availability and performance
• Inventory optimisation though the availability and location of inventory items
• Real-time production information measured per line and per machine
• Limited manual reporting
• Ease of integration with other systems, especially with the ERP system

Conclusion
The proven effectiveness of modern process control principles on the shop floor have been applied to driving collaboration across people, processes and systems by streamlining workflow, enforcing business rules and monitoring the responses of responsible parties. Embedding workflow software within the production environment enables SA Mint to implement standard operating procedures and corrective actions by structuring repeatable, managed responses to process exceptions across the enterprise.

This can be especially effective for processes and workflows that cross organisational boundaries such as operations, maintenance, laboratories and other business domains. Based on the success of this implementation, it’s probably safe to say that these operating principles will be replicated across the rest of SA Mint.