Newmont Merian MPA

Sector: Gold

Project overview

When Newmont Merian, an open pit gold mine in north-eastern Suriname, South America, needed a production accounting and reporting solution to leverage its AVEVA PI system, Mipac was engaged to deliver.

In less than one year, Mipac’s work on this project resulted in more standardised reporting, easier decision-making and production tracking, as well as more time for operators to optimise and improve production.

This project leveraged Mipac’s expertise in solving complex challenges to save Newmont Merian both time and money.

Project highlights:

Upgraded the production accounting system to leverage the AVEVA PI System
Key plant data sources were integrated including:
- Assaynet (Assay Laboratory)
- Minestar (Plant Feed)
- Mineman (Bullion database/sales)
- EHS (Tailings/ETP compliance info)
MPA applications provided a foundation for the production accounting system reporting and data entry.

Background

The Newmont Merian Mine is an open pit gold mine, located in north-eastern Suriname, approximately 98km south-east of the capital Paramaribo.

Operated by Newmont Suriname LLC, a fully owned subsidiary of Newmont Goldcorp Corporation, this mine’s annual gold production is 393 attributable Koz. The mine started commercial production in October 2016 and has an expected mine life of 12-14 years.

Newmont Merian was experiencing problems with labour-intensive manual data entry. This manual process was time-consuming, required manual data transfer between systems and resulted in errors. In addition, the existing Excel-based system lacked security options for sensitive data and did not provide access to real-time process data. While Newmont Merian’s data entry system tracked production, it provided no opportunity to interrogate inefficiency.

In 2019, Newmont Merian engaged Mipac as part of a CAPEX project to provide a production accounting and reporting platform. Mipac was chosen as Newmont’s preferred partner for this project following the successful completion of similar works at Newmont’s Cripple Creek Mine in Colorado.

Scope

Mipac was engaged to provide engineering services to the Newmont Merian gold mine, enabling them to develop a comprehensive digital reporting and analysis platform. This included:

Implementation of MPA Production Reporting to visualise production KPIs to key stakeholders
Automating Metals Accounting, Shift and Process reports
Using MPA Logsheets to digitise and optimise the existing Excel/paper logsheets
Integration and consolidation of data sources into a single repository
AVEVA PI Asset framework design and development to support data sources, calculations and reporting
User acceptance testing
Remote training
Remote support

Timeline

This project was initiated in late 2019 and officially commenced in January 2020. Though the core work was completed in less than twelve months, a three-year package of ongoing support was included from the beginning to ensure any results could be sustained in the long term

Late 2019: Mipac engaged

January 2020: Initial site visit and stakeholder meetings

March 2020: Scoping and planning. Design and work on different interfaces.

June 2020: Initial design and integration complete

July 2020: Integration of mining system

November 2020: Met accounting complete

2021 – 2023: Ongoing MPA and PI System support

February 2022: Reconfiguration of the gravity gold calculations to provide additional accuracy

2023: Cloud migration support

Project challenges

Project challenges overcome by the team included:

Results

With the implementation of MPA, Mipac helped the staff of Newmont Merian to gain greater visibility of their data and increased production insights – meaning that not only is their data more consistent and trustworthy, but they can also use this data to make short-term operational decisions and accurately account for how much income they are generating.

Mipac’s work has also helped the team with reporting and monitoring results in real-time, increasing reliability and meaning less time is spent on manual data entry.

Finally, staff are no longer putting out fires but optimising and improving production on-site, saving them time and, ultimately, saving the company money.

"Working with Mipac was a real pleasure. We worked as a team and were able to achieve great results for our daily production reporting. We saw significant benefits with our reporting, data visualisation and data security. I would recommend Mipac to anyone."

Yuanbin Qin

Senior Metallurgist, Newmont Merian

Newmont Merian MPA