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.

Goals

• Mitigate the risk posed by unsupported legacy systems
• Modernise and streamline the manufacturing process
• Consolidate the various server platforms required for the manufacturing process

Solutions and Products

• System Platform
• Historian
• InTouch
• InBatch

Challenges

• Reverse engineering the existing InControl system
• Transporting the well-designed S88 standards to the new PLC

Results

• Business risk was reduced
• Production information is available to more people
• System design and reliability was improved
• Reduced hardware support through the virtualisation of the manufacturing servers

Midrand, Gauteng, South Africa

Quality, innovation and, above all, consistency, are the hallmarks of L’Oréal products – and that’s why accurate batch management is of such importance to the company that has led the cosmetics industry for more than a century. But there’s more to quality production than excellent batch management.

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.

Goals

• Mitigate the effect of power outages from the national grid
• Centralised engineering
• Implementation of standards
• Stable, scalable and flexible operational information and control software platform
• Increased security
• Operational safety
• User-defined reporting facilities
• Traceable cause-and-effect scenarios

Solutions and Products

• AVEVA System Platform
• AVEVA InTouch
• AVEVA Historian
• Software Toolbox’s TOP Server I/O suite

Challenges

• Multiple contractors
• Resistance to change
• Limited time for full functional test

Results

• Power outages reduced from hours to minutes
• Secure remote access and switching of MV switchgear
• Reduced solution deployment time and costs
• Scalable solution will cater with port expansion
• Rapid data analysis through real-time reporting
• Fault finding down to the device level
• Early involvement of relevant personnel for the resolution of issues
• Remote VPN for faster service provider support.
• Fail-safe operation through extensive redundancy measure

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.

Implementation

The port’s complex electrical system uses medium voltage (MV) circuit breakers from a variety of manufacturers, various power monitoring meters and protection relays, as well as synchronising relays and engine management controls. It is comprised of:

• Two separately located primary 33kV supply feeds from the municipality
• One 33kV ring main unit link as backup
• 33kV to 11kV transformers
• 33kV to 6.6kV transformers
• Four 2.5MVA diesel generators
• Ten power factor correction banks
• Feeders, bus couplers, regenerative cranes at the berths and more

TNPA chose systems integrator Convenient Software Solutions (CSS) to implement the extensive upgrade project because of the company’s experience and knowledge of the AVEVA ArchestrA technology, provided by IS³, and their local presence, which meant good support and access to professional services when needed.

CSS chose to continue with the IS³ | AVEVA solution set by adding System Platform based on ArchestrA technology and the real-time AVEVA Historian. This would not only integrate seamlessly with the existing InTouch systems but also ticked all the boxes of flexibility, scalability, centralised software engineering, redundancy and the enforcement of standards in TNPA’s list of system requirements.

Bearing in mind the key system requirements, the design phase included numerous meetings to establish and finalise the software structure, the network and communication layout, tag naming convention, the HMI and its navigation facilities, documentation requirements, security provisions, data logging and trending needs as well as alarm management.

“Using the agreed operational criteria, CSS then developed a thin-slice implementation as proof of concept,” says Transnet electrical engineer Johan Sauerman. “This helped to confirm that we were on the right track with respect to our overall design philosophy and that the inherent flexibility of the chosen solutions could meet our current control and information needs. Equally important was that the same solutions would meet our changing needs in the future with regard to the port’s planned expansions and increased complexity.”

“The system as it stands today is quite extensive,” says CSS systems engineer Warren Hofland. “It comprises 13 PLCs, 8 remote I/O drops, 3 servers, 13 SCADA control stations with local Application Object Server (AOS), 5 Historian Client stations, over 2000 physical I/Os and 65 SCADA/HMI screens.”

Software Toolbox’s TOP Server I/O suite is used to communicate with various equipment such as Schneider PLCs, deep-sea controllers, CAT engine control panels, GE protection relays, Landis and Gyr power meters, IFM vibration monitoring instrumentation and a Cogent OPC Datahub.

“We paid particular attention to redundancy as this was a critical requirement,” says Hofland. “40 km of redundant fibre optic network now links the key elements of the system such as the hot standby controllers and the redundant AOS peer network to 13 local stations which will fail over to the centralised AOS server in case of problems. ‘Store and forward’ functionality protects the data while a wireless VPN is used for the remote control and operation of MV switchgear and generators.”

The wealth of organised information available in the real-time Historian is designed to support operational decisions and in this regard, Transnet personnel were able to diagnose the past and plan for the future. “We have found immense value in using the historian client to access historical trend information for investigative and diagnostic purposes,” says Sauerman.

A project of this scale will naturally involve many players and this was clear from the start. So the goal was to keep one’s eye on the objective and to ensure that all the various contractors did the same while respecting one another’s contributions. “Change is always a challenge,” says Hofland. “The trick is to make it exciting rather than threatening by showing that end-user needs are truly being addressed through everybody’s collaborative contributions.”

Conclusion
Perhaps the most significant benefit of all for the TNPA is the peace of mind that the Port of Durban, the most important international import/export hub in the country, is now master of its own fate with respect to the reliability of its electrical supply. But, while the effect of power interruptions by the national grid has been reduced from hours to minutes, perhaps the wisest decision the TNPA took was to review their operational information and control infrastructure in its entirety and adopt a solution with the flexibility and scalability to deal with the port’s ambitious expansion plans.

Benefits

• Far more secure and controllable power supply to the port
• Secure remote access and switching of MV switchgear
• Centralised development environment greatly reduces solution deployment time and costs
• System capability to easily handle future port expansions
• Rapid data analysis through real-time reporting
• Fault finding down to the device level from any InTouch view station
• Accurate diagnostics enable operators to involve the right people the first time
• Remote VPN for faster service provider support
• Redundancy on historian SQL server using ‘Store and Forward’ function – provides guarantee of data trail

Goals

• Mitigate the risk posed by unsupported legacy systems
• Modernise and streamline the manufacturing process
• Consolidate the various server platforms required for the manufacturing process

Solutions and Products

• System Platform
• Historian
• InTouch
• InBatch

Challenges

• Reverse engineering the existing InControl system
• Transporting the well-designed S88 standards to the new PLC

Results

• Business risk was reduced
• Production information is available to more people
• System design and reliability was improved
• Reduced hardware support through the virtualisation of the manufacturing servers

Midrand, Gauteng, South Africa

Quality, innovation and, above all, consistency, are the hallmarks of L’Oréal products – and that’s why accurate batch management is of such importance to the company that has led the cosmetics industry for more than a century. But there’s more to quality production than excellent batch management.

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.

Implementation

The port’s complex electrical system uses medium voltage (MV) circuit breakers from a variety of manufacturers, various power monitoring meters and protection relays, as well as synchronising relays and engine management controls. It is comprised of:

• Two separately located primary 33kV supply feeds from the municipality
• One 33kV ring main unit link as backup
• 33kV to 11kV transformers
• 33kV to 6.6kV transformers
• Four 2.5MVA diesel generators
• Ten power factor correction banks
• Feeders, bus couplers, regenerative cranes at the berths and more

TNPA chose systems integrator Convenient Software Solutions (CSS) to implement the extensive upgrade project because of the company’s experience and knowledge of the AVEVA ArchestrA technology, provided by IS³, and their local presence, which meant good support and access to professional services when needed.

CSS chose to continue with the IS³ | AVEVA solution set by adding System Platform based on ArchestrA technology and the real-time AVEVA Historian. This would not only integrate seamlessly with the existing InTouch systems but also ticked all the boxes of flexibility, scalability, centralised software engineering, redundancy and the enforcement of standards in TNPA’s list of system requirements.

Bearing in mind the key system requirements, the design phase included numerous meetings to establish and finalise the software structure, the network and communication layout, tag naming convention, the HMI and its navigation facilities, documentation requirements, security provisions, data logging and trending needs as well as alarm management.

“Using the agreed operational criteria, CSS then developed a thin-slice implementation as proof of concept,” says Transnet electrical engineer Johan Sauerman. “This helped to confirm that we were on the right track with respect to our overall design philosophy and that the inherent flexibility of the chosen solutions could meet our current control and information needs. Equally important was that the same solutions would meet our changing needs in the future with regard to the port’s planned expansions and increased complexity.”

“The system as it stands today is quite extensive,” says CSS systems engineer Warren Hofland. “It comprises 13 PLCs, 8 remote I/O drops, 3 servers, 13 SCADA control stations with local Application Object Server (AOS), 5 Historian Client stations, over 2000 physical I/Os and 65 SCADA/HMI screens.”

Software Toolbox’s TOP Server I/O suite is used to communicate with various equipment such as Schneider PLCs, deep-sea controllers, CAT engine control panels, GE protection relays, Landis and Gyr power meters, IFM vibration monitoring instrumentation and a Cogent OPC Datahub.

“We paid particular attention to redundancy as this was a critical requirement,” says Hofland. “40 km of redundant fibre optic network now links the key elements of the system such as the hot standby controllers and the redundant AOS peer network to 13 local stations which will fail over to the centralised AOS server in case of problems. ‘Store and forward’ functionality protects the data while a wireless VPN is used for the remote control and operation of MV switchgear and generators.”

The wealth of organised information available in the real-time Historian is designed to support operational decisions and in this regard, Transnet personnel were able to diagnose the past and plan for the future. “We have found immense value in using the historian client to access historical trend information for investigative and diagnostic purposes,” says Sauerman.

A project of this scale will naturally involve many players and this was clear from the start. So the goal was to keep one’s eye on the objective and to ensure that all the various contractors did the same while respecting one another’s contributions. “Change is always a challenge,” says Hofland. “The trick is to make it exciting rather than threatening by showing that end-user needs are truly being addressed through everybody’s collaborative contributions.”

Conclusion
Perhaps the most significant benefit of all for the TNPA is the peace of mind that the Port of Durban, the most important international import/export hub in the country, is now master of its own fate with respect to the reliability of its electrical supply. But, while the effect of power interruptions by the national grid has been reduced from hours to minutes, perhaps the wisest decision the TNPA took was to review their operational information and control infrastructure in its entirety and adopt a solution with the flexibility and scalability to deal with the port’s ambitious expansion plans.

Benefits

• Far more secure and controllable power supply to the port
• Secure remote access and switching of MV switchgear
• Centralised development environment greatly reduces solution deployment time and costs
• System capability to easily handle future port expansions
• Rapid data analysis through real-time reporting
• Fault finding down to the device level from any InTouch view station
• Accurate diagnostics enable operators to involve the right people the first time
• Remote VPN for faster service provider support
• Redundancy on historian SQL server using ‘Store and Forward’ function – provides guarantee of data trail

Goals

• Mitigate the risk posed by unsupported legacy systems
• Modernise and streamline the manufacturing process
• Consolidate the various server platforms required for the manufacturing process

Solutions and Products

• System Platform
• Historian
• InTouch
• InBatch

Challenges

• Reverse engineering the existing InControl system
• Transporting the well-designed S88 standards to the new PLC

Results

• Business risk was reduced
• Production information is available to more people
• System design and reliability was improved
• Reduced hardware support through the virtualisation of the manufacturing servers

Midrand, Gauteng, South Africa

Quality, innovation and, above all, consistency, are the hallmarks of L’Oréal products – and that’s why accurate batch management is of such importance to the company that has led the cosmetics industry for more than a century. But there’s more to quality production than excellent batch management.

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.

Implementation

The port’s complex electrical system uses medium voltage (MV) circuit breakers from a variety of manufacturers, various power monitoring meters and protection relays, as well as synchronising relays and engine management controls. It is comprised of:

• Two separately located primary 33kV supply feeds from the municipality
• One 33kV ring main unit link as backup
• 33kV to 11kV transformers
• 33kV to 6.6kV transformers
• Four 2.5MVA diesel generators
• Ten power factor correction banks
• Feeders, bus couplers, regenerative cranes at the berths and more

TNPA chose systems integrator Convenient Software Solutions (CSS) to implement the extensive upgrade project because of the company’s experience and knowledge of the AVEVA ArchestrA technology, provided by IS³, and their local presence, which meant good support and access to professional services when needed.

CSS chose to continue with the IS³ | AVEVA solution set by adding System Platform based on ArchestrA technology and the real-time AVEVA Historian. This would not only integrate seamlessly with the existing InTouch systems but also ticked all the boxes of flexibility, scalability, centralised software engineering, redundancy and the enforcement of standards in TNPA’s list of system requirements.

Bearing in mind the key system requirements, the design phase included numerous meetings to establish and finalise the software structure, the network and communication layout, tag naming convention, the HMI and its navigation facilities, documentation requirements, security provisions, data logging and trending needs as well as alarm management.

“Using the agreed operational criteria, CSS then developed a thin-slice implementation as proof of concept,” says Transnet electrical engineer Johan Sauerman. “This helped to confirm that we were on the right track with respect to our overall design philosophy and that the inherent flexibility of the chosen solutions could meet our current control and information needs. Equally important was that the same solutions would meet our changing needs in the future with regard to the port’s planned expansions and increased complexity.”

“The system as it stands today is quite extensive,” says CSS systems engineer Warren Hofland. “It comprises 13 PLCs, 8 remote I/O drops, 3 servers, 13 SCADA control stations with local Application Object Server (AOS), 5 Historian Client stations, over 2000 physical I/Os and 65 SCADA/HMI screens.”

Software Toolbox’s TOP Server I/O suite is used to communicate with various equipment such as Schneider PLCs, deep-sea controllers, CAT engine control panels, GE protection relays, Landis and Gyr power meters, IFM vibration monitoring instrumentation and a Cogent OPC Datahub.

“We paid particular attention to redundancy as this was a critical requirement,” says Hofland. “40 km of redundant fibre optic network now links the key elements of the system such as the hot standby controllers and the redundant AOS peer network to 13 local stations which will fail over to the centralised AOS server in case of problems. ‘Store and forward’ functionality protects the data while a wireless VPN is used for the remote control and operation of MV switchgear and generators.”

The wealth of organised information available in the real-time Historian is designed to support operational decisions and in this regard, Transnet personnel were able to diagnose the past and plan for the future. “We have found immense value in using the historian client to access historical trend information for investigative and diagnostic purposes,” says Sauerman.

A project of this scale will naturally involve many players and this was clear from the start. So the goal was to keep one’s eye on the objective and to ensure that all the various contractors did the same while respecting one another’s contributions. “Change is always a challenge,” says Hofland. “The trick is to make it exciting rather than threatening by showing that end-user needs are truly being addressed through everybody’s collaborative contributions.”

Conclusion
Perhaps the most significant benefit of all for the TNPA is the peace of mind that the Port of Durban, the most important international import/export hub in the country, is now master of its own fate with respect to the reliability of its electrical supply. But, while the effect of power interruptions by the national grid has been reduced from hours to minutes, perhaps the wisest decision the TNPA took was to review their operational information and control infrastructure in its entirety and adopt a solution with the flexibility and scalability to deal with the port’s ambitious expansion plans.

Benefits

• Far more secure and controllable power supply to the port
• Secure remote access and switching of MV switchgear
• Centralised development environment greatly reduces solution deployment time and costs
• System capability to easily handle future port expansions
• Rapid data analysis through real-time reporting
• Fault finding down to the device level from any InTouch view station
• Accurate diagnostics enable operators to involve the right people the first time
• Remote VPN for faster service provider support
• Redundancy on historian SQL server using ‘Store and Forward’ function – provides guarantee of data trail

Goals

• Mitigate the risk posed by unsupported legacy systems
• Modernise and streamline the manufacturing process
• Consolidate the various server platforms required for the manufacturing process

Solutions and Products

• System Platform
• Historian
• InTouch
• InBatch

Challenges

• Reverse engineering the existing InControl system
• Transporting the well-designed S88 standards to the new PLC

Results

• Business risk was reduced
• Production information is available to more people
• System design and reliability was improved
• Reduced hardware support through the virtualisation of the manufacturing servers

Midrand, Gauteng, South Africa

Quality, innovation and, above all, consistency, are the hallmarks of L’Oréal products – and that’s why accurate batch management is of such importance to the company that has led the cosmetics industry for more than a century. But there’s more to quality production than excellent batch management.

Background

At the Initiating Systems Automated Plant (ISAP), AECI Mining Explosives manufactures detonator assemblies consisting of raw materials, delay powders, delay elements, tubes and shock tubes. Previously, the batch tracking of raw materials and products used in the manufacture of detonators was done with a paper-based system which was prone to human error. It was time for a change and with the business objectives of improving customer relations and AECI Mining Explosives’s competitiveness, as well as consolidating the use of raw materials, the company decided that a greater degree of automation was desirable. Any chosen solution would also have to meet the operational requirements of improving product quality (stop faulty products in their tracks), tracking back from the customer into the batch process to determine the cause of any product failure, decrease human error and assist in the evaluation of the properties and performance of raw materials used in production.

Solution Selection

AECI Mining Explosives chose system integrator Advansys for the implementation because of previous experience and their wide knowledge of the AVEVA (formerly Wonderware) product range. AECI Mining Explosives had previously selected Wonderware’s Production Events Module (today part of the Equipment Operations Module of AVEVA System Platform) to capture real-time process data, link the batch process to execution and to provide detailed batch data reports for analysis. The Production Events Module would track what material was consumed and produced by the process and would work in conjunction with Historian, AVEVA System Platform (Galaxy Repository, Industrial Application Server) and dual-redundant Application Object Servers.

Implementation

“In my opinion, the ability to develop templates which suit most of the tracking functions needed as well as their reusability are two of the most outstanding features of the underlying ArchestrA technology,” says Braam Venter, Megatronics Engineer, Advansys (Pty) Ltd. “Another highlight was the ease of use and the ability to integrate with the Historian .NET components.”

Advansys used a top-down approach which included addressing the operator interfaces which consisted of existing WinCC Flexible touch panels that could only communicate with the PLC. This meant that all the operator instructions had to be routed through the PLC, which led to the development of standard screens with text fields to view messages from the Industrial Application Server. The ability to manage text messages and HMI data from within the Industrial Application Server reduced implementation and commissioning times.

Real-time process data is captured at each production event and this can then be used to analyse if a certain batch is faulty. A production database was implemented for raw material inputs for the production personnel as well as formula management for the various Delay Powder recipes. This database is used as a scanner interface between the Industrial Application Server and the scanners at various production screens.

“The Industrial Application Server is used to drive the production processes via a PLC and WinCC Flexible touch panels,” explains Venter. “The relevant data is then logged in a ProdDB (PEM database). Formulae and raw material data are stored in a production database. A production website has been developed for raw material and formula inputs as well as tracking information. An SAP interface table had to be designed for communicating product quantity produced and consumed.”

A database connection .net object was developed by Advansys to ease the integration with the production database. A scanner driver was written to read UDP packets from the scanner RS232 to UDP converters. This scanner driver then updates the production database with the scanned data.

Benefits

• AECI Mining Explosives now has an accurate tracking system on which the company and its customers can rely
• Improved competitive positioning
• No more paperwork means less human error and improved operator confidence

Conclusion

The new raw material and product tracking system at AECI Mining Explosives’s Initiating Systems Automated Plant is helping the company maintain its century-old formula of agility in dealing with market and technological developments. Accurate and rapid backtracking is helping to pinpoint and isolate problem areas faster than ever before and to continuously improve on product quality while minimising waste and evaluating raw material specifications. As such, the new tracking system is helping to keep the wheels of the mining industry moving more effectively at a time when it needs it most.