Glencore
Kamoto Copper Company
RtDUET Downtime Reporting
- Democratic Republic of the Congo
- Copper, Cobalt
- Mining
Project Overview
Kamoto Copper Company (KCC), a Glencore-owned mining and refining complex in the Democratic Republic of Congo, faced significant challenges in maximising its production efficiency and reliability. Despite a substantial investment in infrastructure, KCC struggled to achieve optimal returns due to equipment downtime and a lack of standardized data collection and analysis.
To address these issues, KCC sought the expertise of Mipac, a company renowned for its work in reliability and maintenance optimisation. Drawing on its experience with similar projects, particularly at Mount Isa Mines, Mipac implemented its RtDuet software to provide KCC with enhanced visibility into equipment downtime, standardised data collection, and automated reporting capabilities.
Background
KCC is an integrated facility of 2 sites, KTC the mine and concentrator and Luilu which is the Refinery. KCC takes ore and transforms it all the way to copper cathode, which is high purity copper, so it is a large operation with a lot of different metallurgical operations. Glencore now owns these facilities and produces both Copper and Cobalt.
Kamoto has a fantastic orebody and a large investment had been made in the infrastructure of the mine and plant, but they had struggled with the returns so far.
Mipac was contacted by KCC as some of their team knew of our work with RtDUET from Mount Isa Mines.
Project Scope
Mipac installed and configured RtDUET to automatically capture the equipment downtime at KCC for both their KTC concentrator and the Refinery at Luilu.
The first step in an RtDUET project is to have a workshop with the plant stakeholders from engineering, operations, reliability and maintenance to define how RtDuet will be implemented for their site. Mipac typically had travelled to sites to hold this workshop in person. As this project happened during the COVID-19 pandemic, this was Mipac’s first remote workshop that was held over a couple of sessions using Microsoft Teams.
KCC wanted to track the downtime of more than 30 assets, so a Site License was procured, which changes the software agreement to an annual subscription, but allows for unlimited assets to be tracked. This has allowed KCC to continue to track new or different parts of the plant as their knowledge and capability with RtDUET has grown.
RtDUET can allow for multiple languages so we worked with the KCC team to have the reason tree and time usage codes available in both English and French. Users can switch between the languages as they need. Training was provided to operators and engineers by video conference.
Glencore had a standard Time Usage Model that they used globally across their plants and so Mipac was able to implement this Time Usage Model for KCC to standardise their downtime tracking.
Mipac also configured the RtDUET Reportsync to send the RtDUET downtime data to SQL. KCC built their own Power BI reporting by connecting to the data in SQL.
Project Challenges
- KCC wanted to have better visibility and to be able to find the ‘low hanging fruit’ that could be fixed to improve their reliability and production.
- KCC wanted to turn data into information. To make sense of the data that can be recorded.
- KCC was struggling with equipment downtime but had no good measurements or data. They were using handwritten shift logs and then entering this data into Excel. Their main issue was tracking the running hours and availability of their assets.
- Different personnel at KCC each had their own system for measuring the performance of the plant, so they wanted to standardise this and have all the data centralised in one place.
- KCC had recently completed a project to implement the AVEVA PI Historian, so their team had limited knowledge and exposure to their process data and what can be done with it, such as automated calculations and reports.
- KCC is located in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, so the main language is French, but a number of the engineers and managers were English speaking, so some ability to switch between the languages was desired to make it accessible for both.
- KCC got in contact with Mipac in October 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, so a remote delivery approach was necessary.
Results
Mipac was able to remotely deliver and provide training for RtDUET at KCC. Over 30 machine centres were configured across the two plants. It allowed them to standardise their downtime capture and KPI reporting based on Glencore’s global standards.
KCC continue to use RtDUET to track and report on their equipment downtime and Mipac continues to work with them to improve the system and train personnel.
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