PRESS RELEASE: In-line with its long-time strategy to invest in software and service solutions for the mining, metals and minerals industries, Schneider Electric is committed to helping mining organisations drive digital transformation across their enterprise. This initiative can help optimise the mining supply chain, drive efficiency and maximise utilisation of all operating assets, resulting in better profitability.

Mining companies are challenged with volatile commodity prices, rising energy costs and increased global competition. These organisations must shift focus to proactively review internal processes, identify new process improvement opportunities and leverage new technologies to drive operational excellence across the entire mining value chain.

Schneider Electric offers mining organisations an opportunity to digitally transform their operations with highly accurate, real-time visibility to information across production, inventory and quality management processes. Miners can now automatically log all inputs and outputs of the plant in real-time, including materials, consumables, energy, waste and emissions output.

This data, when made available to domain-specific decision support tools and integrated with supply chain and enterprise resource planning systems, unlocks new levels of intelligence to drive continuous improvement. Eliminating manually entered production values while breaking down pervasive operational data silos can minimise time, errors and costs associated with manual and duplicate data-entry, further enhancing agility and efficiency.

“Digitalisation is a force that can transform key aspects of mining at every step of the value chain. A strong value of our mining industry solution is the addition of real-time production accounting and inventory management, which lets you actively optimise material movements and increase productivity, said Doug Warren, vice president, software, industry solutions at Schneider Electric. “This functionality provides miners with more visibility and control over one of their biggest assets – the inventory work-in-progress (WIP) – and closes the loop between planning/scheduling and actuals, in near real-time. This is a key construct for short interval control, prevalent in manufacturing for many years and now available for the mining industry.”

Mining organisations implementing Ampla Mining Operations Management as part of their Schneider Electric solution can benefit from the EcoStruxure architecture, resulting in better process and data integration across their organisation. What results is a better way to drive innovation at every level, with vertical integration from sensors to edge control to software/analytics at the same time as end-to-end integration across the value chain and help break down data silos. This approach can increase efficiency, remove value leaks and result in increased profitability.

Select improvements of Schneider Electric Software’s MOM solution for the mining industry include:

• User selectable point in time feature for ‘Inventory data reprocessing’;
• Data reprocessing has improved performance by 4X;
• New ‘Calculated Inventory’ feature to define custom calculations on captured inventory data;
• Ampla Planner, Gantt Chart usability and user experience enhancements;
• Client response times has improved performance by 2X; and
• Wonderware Online InSight connectivity.