Newmont Merian
MPA
- Location: Suriname
- Client: Newmont Mining Corporation
- Technical Specs: AVEVA PI System and MPA
How Newmont’s Merian mine saved hundreds of hours in production reporting
The plant production team at Newmont’s Merian mine was wasting hundreds of hours each year on Excel-based production reporting. They had to manually log data in one system, and then transfer it to another. A time-consuming and inefficient process that no one enjoyed. By digitalising this process, they standardised reporting and simplified decision-making and can now accurately track production metrics across the plant.
Today, the metallurgists spend less time merging messy siloed data and more time optimising production across the plant. Here’s how they did it.
The problem: Manual data entry was wasting time and delaying decision-making
In 2019, a senior metallurgist at Merian Mine noticed that production reporting was a daily burden. The metallurgy team required two to three hours each shift to manually enter data into Excel, manipulate it, and then transfer it between systems. This wasn’t just labour-intensive, it was also prone to manual errors.
Their Excel-based system lacked security options for sensitive data and didn’t allow them to process data in real-time. So, they couldn’t spot production problems and inefficiencies as they occurred. This meant that production deviations could take days to resolve after combing through historical data to find the cause.
There weren’t any real-time production parameter displays, so other than the control operators most team members had limited access to operational information and this slowed down decision-making.
Secondly, there was a large amount of manual data entry. This causes a large amount of time sync for the metrics, and using different systems for data entry tends to introduce errors.
Lastly, production reporting using Excel was limited. There were limited security options for sensitive data and data manipulation in Excel was non-compliant with numerous meta accounting standards. Sometimes a high level of Excel literacy was required to troubleshoot the problems in Excel,” explains Senior Metallurgist Yuanbin Qin in a presentation at AVEVA PI World.
“All of it required manual intervention from metallurgists to manually transfer the data even though the source of the data was a SQL database,” says Daniel Qiao, a systems and automation engineer with Mipac who specialises in the design of digitalisation solutions for mineral processing plants.
Our technical recommendations
Newmont asked us to recommend production reporting digitalisation options. They knew we had successfully rolled out a similar project at Newmont’s Cripple Creek Mine in Colorado the year before and wanted custom recommendations for their site.
They wanted a system that could:
- Visualise production KPIs to key stakeholders (beyond the control room)
- Automate metals accounting, shift and process reports
- Digitise and optimise the existing Excel/paper logsheets
- Integrate and consolidate data sources into a single repository
- Work seamlessly with the AVEVA PI Asset framework design
- Pass user acceptance testing
- Support remote training
We recommended they migrate from their outdated Excel reporting system to a modern web-based platform that could leverage the AVEVA PI asset framework.
They chose to use the MPA suite because it fully integrates with their plant’s AVEVA PI software.
“It means that any other manual data entry, where there are no instruments available, can be entered using an iPad on a logsheet which uses MPA to visualise data in the PI system,” explains Daniel.
The outcome: A digitalised production reporting system
After implementing the MPA software suite, the Merian team can now visualise their data across multiple systems, which has opened up a whole new world of production insights.
Today, their data is more accurate and visible so they can use it to make short-term operational decisions and accurately account for how much income they’re generating.
They can now report and monitor results in real-time, so their processes are more reliable. And they no longer spend several hours per day manually entering and managing data.
That wasted time can now be spent optimising and improving production in the process plant. It’s a big win for the Merian production team.
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