To meet the demand from the enormous growth taking place in the metals, mining and mineral processing industries, producers are continually looking for ways to maximize the availability and productivity of their assets. However, the severe shortage of high-value personnel is making it difficult to plan or staff productivity improvement projects. At the same time, the increasing pressure to reduce energy consumption and effectively manage air emissions, water and ground pollution are taking a toll on profitability.
IPS has the capabilities, solutions and knowledge of the mineral processing industries to enable measurable and proven performance improvements from the mine to the concentrators and through smelting. Our unique approach helps clients measure their business accurately in real time, empowering all plant personnel to build an enterprise-wide, real time infrastructure on which to apply advanced technologies that drive business performance within each concentrator, smelter and across the mineral processing enterprise.
To address the challenges and unique requirements of the metals, mining and mineral processing industry, IPS brings together key elements from our comprehensive product portfolio with powerful solutions including:
- Critical Asset Management transforming your operations to a predictive and proactive approach encompassing operations, maintenance and supply chain to accelerate production, reduce lifting costs and extend asset life
- Operator & Engineering Effectiveness enhancing overall team productivity and utilization through right-time scenario evaluation, training and critical situation management while providing a highly productive and intuitive environment with templates that enable consistent, high quality engineering solutions in a collaborative environment
- Maintenance Effectiveness providing the required availability at the lowest possible cost through best practices and advanced techniques including Condition Based Maintenance and Reliability Centred maintenance.
- Real Time Finance providing global visibility to all key performance indicators and the financial impact of operational decisions
- Production Optimization improves yield, minimizes quality giveaway and fuel blend reworks, and reduces inventory and maintenance costs
All of these solutions are enabled by the global industry experience embodied in our Global Consulting organization. This world class team works with our clients to identify the issues and opportunities and develop the strategy, action plan and ROI for the necessary solution components.
IPS has significant experience in implementing solutions for the mining, metals and mineral processing industries, including advanced control for smelting operations to effectively control temperature, free metal, magnetite concentration and feed improvements. We have also successfully applied advanced process control for concentrating operations to address water usage, energy consumption and process stabilization in order to meet or exceed production targets and reduce production costs.
Our clients have been able to reduce outages by 10-15% and improve their start up/shut down procedure design.
Other typical results include:
- Reduced temperature variation by 27%
- Increased average converter temperature by 6 oC
- Reduced costly operations at high temperature by 32% while increasing the average temperature.
- 31% Reduction in Copper variability
- 13% Reduction in Fe3O4 variability
On average, our clients have realized 3 to 5% increases in throughput and 1-3% reductions in costs.