Customer Success Story: Production Accounting

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The customer needed a sophisticated software solution that could handle their complex iron ore production scenarios and consistently provide accurate, reliable data. Traditional spreadsheet software and manual reporting practices could not meet the requirements to efficiently manage, audit and analyse their production data.

OVERVIEW

The customer’s primary goal was the continuous improvement of their data handling, analysis and reporting capabilities to enable data-driven decision making for stakeholders across the organisation. Datamine’s Production Accounting solution provides the tools to support their continuous improvement goals.

Production Accounting enables the customer to:

Accurately calculate plant feed head grade (by calculating the combination of tails and products) to overcome their on-stream sampling limitations

Monitor the performance of individual operational units within their process plant

Rapidly identify potential field instrument failure through data validation and customisable warning and error messages

Easily extract live and historical production data for analysis and reporting

CUSTOMER PROFILE

With a reputation as a world-class player in iron ore, this customer’s core business is integrated iron ore mining, rail and port operations.

“We are one of the largest dedicated iron ore producers in our region. Although our mine spreads over a large tenement area, not all of the material is good enough to be shipped as it is dug out. It’s taken to a processing plant, and from there, is railed to the port and shipped. Datamine’s Production Accounting is the package we use for mass balancing over the processing plant.”

The customer’s Specialist Metallurgical Accountant

CHALLENGE

Spreadsheet dependency:

The business sought to avoid the risks of dependency on traditional, generalist spreadsheet software. Its limitations include laborious manual data entry, lack of version control and potential errors associated with managing large datasets.
Operational complexity:

Mine operations spread over multiple kilometres made logistics and effective communication challenging.
Sampling costs:

Feed sampling was onerous and costly due to the mine’s scale and geographical spread. Unreliable sample data made mass balancing with spreadsheet software impractical.
Data integrity:

Large volumes of data manually compiled from various sources introduces the risk of human error. Using traditional spreadsheet software as both a calculation engine and central database is problematic as it lacks features for effective data validation, traceability and auditing.

SOLUTION

Production Accounting provides a complete metallurgical accounting solution designed for mining, mineral processing, smelting, and refining operations. It addresses key production accounting challenges with fully auditable data entry, calculations, and approvals.

Production Accounting offers full integration capability for production data from various sources. Its flexible configuration caters to the customer’s complex site and business requirements and provides an accurate, unified view of production data across their iron ore operations.

Data validation:

Production Accounting includes configurable validation messages that alert users to data anomalies. This helps the customer’s metallurgists more rapidly identify and address potential instrumentation issues.
Fully auditable data:

The system’s data approval workflows, data quarantine function and comprehensive audit log ensure transparency and traceability at every step. Authorised site metallurgists review and approve the iron ore production data for each shift, improving the accountability of reported data.
Data preservation:

Production Accounting preserves data from past periods to enable accurate analysis and reporting. The customer can easily extract current and historical data for analysis in their enterprise reporting application.

PROCESS

The customer adopted Production Accounting as their preferred solution from the outset of their iron ore operations.

Production Accounting was uniquely able to address their business needs and deliver their desired operational efficiencies, improved reporting, streamlined mass balancing, enhanced data accuracy, and optimised plant performance monitoring.

Since the original implementation, Datamine has continued supporting the customer to maximise the software’s functionality and integration potential:

“At the moment we are…connecting Production Accounting to the Microsoft Power Business Intelligence (BI) platform. Datamine Metallurgical Principal and Product Manager, Mirelle Tjong, co-ordinates everything for us. We can connect it up to anything. We don’t have to know how to code to install Production Accounting or run it on a daily basis.”

The customer’s Specialist Metallurgical Accountant

RESULTS

Optimised plant performance monitoring

Data validation notifications helped metallurgists identify missing values and unexpected inputs/outputs.
Real-time, integrated plant data processed and calculated.

Enhanced data accuracy and analysis

Efficient handling of large volumes of data

Seamless integration of the plant’s instrumentation data and lab assays from multiple source systems

Live and historical data stored in a centralised, secure database

Improved accountability of reported data

Advanced calculation tracing and auditability of user-modified and integrated data

SUMMARY

This mining customer implemented Datamine’s metallurgical accounting software solution hoping to improve data analysis and reporting for their iron ore processing plant.

Their Production Accounting implementation delivered powerful integration capabilities, advanced data processing and calculation, customisable data validation, and data approval, auditing and preservation features.