Prominent Hill PIMS

The Client

OZ Minerals is Australia’s third largest diversified mining company and is the world’s second largest producer of zinc as well as a substantial producer of copper, lead, gold and silver.

OZ Minerals Limited owns 100% of the Prominent Hill copper-gold project located in South Australia. The operation includes an open-pit mine and a conventional grinding and flotation processing plant with an 8mtpa capacity. Prominent Hill concentrates will travel directly to its Asian customers, including smelters in China and India, via the Adelaide to Darwin railway and the Port of Darwin.

The Problem

Being a green-field site, OZ Minerals had no existing operational management systems. The site management team were faced with the task of selecting and implementing all required systems, including but not limited to Production Accounting, Equipment Condition Monitoring, Alarm Management, Downtime Management and Operational Reporting. 

To support best practice operations of the new project, OZ Minerals required a system that could:

  • capture all commissioning data to accelerate commissioning (Historian),
  • scale with production ramp-up during commissioning (Scalability),
  • extend from Prominent Hill to other OZ Minerals operations (Extensibility),
  • be intuitive and easy to use for technical staff (Usability), and most importantly
  • provide a low cost, process centric, auditable and robust solution to meet OZ Minerals long term requirements (Sustainability),

The Solution

Amidst a tight project development timeline, with scarce OZ Minerals stakeholders available, Optika devised a strategy that differentiated core and immediate requirements from non-core and less urgent requirements. Optika then conducted a review of existing technologies and vendors available in the Australian market and designed a federated Service Orientated Architecture that Incorporated best of breed components from several vendors.

Importantly, the entire Operational Management Systems platform was designed around a central concept of a Plant Object Model. This model was a digital taxonomic representation of the Prominent Hill processing facility, including an equipment hierarchy down to sensor level. This provided OZ Minerals with a core information asset, which meant their solution was extensible, scalable and intelligent.

 OZ Minerals engaged Optika to provide project management and integration services for the implementation of the Production Accounting solution. 

Optika formed an agile project team, incorporating staff from all parties including the client and the vendors, to create a cohesive and responsive team with a common goal. Key staff secondment from OZ Minerals allowed for agile scope review and requirements management, with the net result of substantial additional functionality being delivered at no additional cost.

Optika engaged the technology vendors and provided a single source of accountability to the OZ Minerals Project Director.

Results

The implementation of the solution was extremely successful, with the project being delivered on-time and under budget, along with substantial additional functionality. The solution was delivered ahead of plant commissioning and allowed technical staff to focus on plant ramp-up. Return on investment was estimated to be in the order of several months.