Northern Star
Logsheets Digitalisation
- Location: Pogo Mine Alaska
- Technical Specs: Logsheets
- Industry: Gold
How Northern Star’s Pogo plant freed up more than 1500 hours per year spent on Excel logsheets
The operations team at Northern Star’s Pogo mine in Alaska spent hours every day managing Excel logsheets. And sometimes more, fixing macros issues when they arose. Manual data entry was time-consuming and legacy issues across documents continually made things difficult for the metallurgists.
Frustrated and ready to take the first step towards a digital plant, the met team decided to start by digitalising their logsheets. The result was well beyond what they had hoped for: they now spend zero hours maintaining Excel-based logsheets, which has freed them up to do more important work in the plant. Here’s how they did it.
Before: Hours spent on logsheets
Logsheets are an essential part of every process plant. There are often many streams where the operators need to take manual checks because instrumentation in those places isn’t possible. For example, where pipework isn’t suitable to put a density gauge on.
Logsheets also verify instrumentation in the plant. Sometimes instrumentation fails, and over time it drifts, making the readings inaccurate. Logsheets are a good way to manually check things like densities and flow rates, so the operations team can pick up when that instrumentation needs calibration or to get changed out.
“Pogo’s process plant is essentially 10 different unit operations in a small area, each having one to two logsheets. That’s a lot of data entry on many different spreadsheets floating around,” explains Glen Johnson, an industrial automation engineer for Mipac who managed the project.
The logsheets were all Excel-based and every single cell was a manual data entry point (see image). From there, they used VBA macros to upload the data into their AVEVA PI historian.
Issues with Excel spreadsheets
The met team had numerous issues with Excel spreadsheets. One time, a ‘catastrophic failure’ error message appeared where the damage to the file was so extensive that they couldn’t repair it.
“This is the type of thing we would face on an almost daily basis with the sheer number of Excel spreadsheets we had,” said James Sweeney, Project Metallurgist for Northern Star Resources – Pogo Operations, in a presentation at AVEVA World.
Managing different operators with different accounts also caused headaches. The operators and the metallurgists spent hours fixing issues with these spreadsheets.
Then, there was a noticeable data lag for the metallurgists who had to analyse the data as the PI System uploads from the spreadsheets were confined to 24-hour periods.
“We were confining it to 24-hour periods and using averages over that time, so there just wasn’t much granularity in the data,” explains James.
Reviewing all the options
In 2022, the Pogo team began to look for ways to digitalise their logsheets by leveraging the existing plant data in the AVEVA PI System.
They wanted to configure them closely to the Excel versions but as a web-based program using the PI Asset Framework. When it came to the data, it was important that they could specify the timestamps so they coincided with the operators’ rounds. And from a plant visibility standpoint, they were interested in having real-time PI data uploads and access to better visualisations.
They considered all their software options, including other AVEVA PI ecosystem products, but had shied away from those due to clunky interfaces and slow, cumbersome UX.
Northern Star approached Mipac after partnering on other PI System work together. Our product specialists reviewed their plant’s technical set-up and recommended they choose software built specifically for mineral processing plants to visualise and share data with the PI system.
We knew MPA would be ideal to solve their issues because it has:
- A workflow engine that combines data from PI AF and other systems
- A simple UI that allows quick navigation around logsheets and time periods
- Conditional formatting to reduce entry errors and surface issues quickly
“Using an iterative approach, we developed some simple logsheets to give Northern Star a look and feel of the data visualisation,” said Glen.
“Then the met team reviewed it and showed it to the operators for feedback, and we made a number of changes to suit the plant and their way of working. All those changes were worthwhile in the end because when we got to the user acceptance testing and operational readiness handover, that was very smooth.”
After: Real-time data visualised in a useful way
The time-saving benefits of digitalised logsheets were apparent immediately because it removed manual data entry. “I tried to calculate the benefit based on percent improvement in time savings, but it is not possible to divide by zero! With MPA, we no longer spend any time maintaining our log sheet system,” explained James.
No data lag
But it was other aspects of the new system that they began to appreciate once it was live. For starters, the met team had access to real-time PI System data. As soon as data is collected and entered by the operator, the metallurgy team can see it on the PI System and know exactly what is happening at the time rather than the day after. In terms of communication site-wide, the plant data is readily accessible to view and share with a wider audience at all times.
Single source of truth
Further, the data is much easier to visualise and MPA has created a single source of truth for the plant. “With Excel spreadsheets, it’s possible to get multiple copies of spreadsheets. They might have different operating targets, or they might have the old targets and we’ve changed them. It gets confusing that way. So this ensured that everything was the same,” said James.
More accurate, more efficient
The increased accuracy and reliability of information has led the wider business to see the value in digitalisation and they are now looking to roll MPA out to several other Northern Star mine sites.
“Part of why they chose MPA is because it doesn’t just do logsheets. It can fulfil multiple use cases with a single suite of applications,” said Glen. “It grows with you and you can progressively add in other tools later.”
Northern Star’s Pogo mine is a great example of a mature process plant taking the first steps towards digitalisation in an easy and manageable way. Digitialising a manual process like logsheets can save your team hours of time and frees you up to do more important work. The software that is available now is easy to implement and a good place to start.
The met team at Pogo’s plant are enjoying seeing the results of these small changes. They now have better quality data and are able to use that knowledge of their plant to make better maintenance and reliability decisions.
Want to learn more?
