Following the successful implementation of Citect's manufacturing execution system, Ampla, at Elizabeth Bay Mine, Namdeb has decided to award Citect with the enterprise rollout for all its plants.
The Elizabeth Bay mine is situated near the Atlantic Ocean port of Luderitz and contributes about 8% to Namdeb's annual production. The plant consists of three parts:
* Crushing/milling.
* Density medium separation system.
* Recovery plant.
"Namdeb initially chose Citect to do the installation as most of the products on the mine are 'Citect-friendly'," said Citect director, Wilhelm Swart. "Our numerous reference sites also contributed to the decision-making process."
Already a user of CitectScada, the Elizabeth Bay Diamond Mine chose Ampla to assist with the identification of causes and locations of downtime occurrences. The goal is the eliminating of downtime contributing factors. Ampla was also selected for its realtime production reporting ability that will be used during daily plant production meetings.
"Citect has a long history in the mining industry with customers like BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto and De Beers," continued Swart. "In fact, the newest version of Ampla was designed in conjunction with several mining companies to optimise it for the specialised needs of the mining industry. The specific MES requirements for the mining arena are not understood by many MES vendors. Our system provides fault tolerance and data integrity in the event of network outages caused by the remoteness and inhospitable conditions of most mining operations. It also permits both distributed and centralised system architectures for easy management."
The Elizabeth Bay project was executed by Citect's Professional Services team according to ISO 9001 standards. The project followed these stages:
* A needs identification phase.
* Development of a functional design specification.
* In-house development and testing.
* Factory acceptance testing.
* Commissioning.
* Hand-over phase.
Citect first installed a pilot that consisted of five Ampla modules: downtime, quality, metrics, maintenance and production. These modules monitor if the mine is operating at its peak efficiency by identifying where, how and why production delays are occurring. Production meetings are now held daily, where reports can be easily drawn with better availability and visibility than previously. The supplier also assisted with support and maintenance, as well as operator and maintenance training for Namdeb employees involved to enable them to troubleshoot on their own.
Citect is a leading, global provider of industrial automation, realtime intelligence, building automation, manufacturing execution systems (MES) and on-demand benchmarking applications. Namdeb Diamond Corporation is a joint ownership between the Namibian government and De Beers Centenary.
For more information contact Niconette du Toit, Citect, +27 (0)11 699 6600, [email protected], www.citect.com
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