10 minute read
“There is only one way to eat an elephant: a bite at a time.” – Desmond Tutu
You know the feeling. We’ve all been there.
The task ahead is a mountain – a veritable elephant, one could say – and you have no idea where to start.
The entire mining industry is moving in the direction of digital transformation. Expectations are high. Your manager or board may have asked you to figure out how it could look at your operation.
You know your site, but how are you supposed to know what kind of digital transformation it needs? Is it an all-in situation, or do you start small? What issue are you trying to fix? How much do you need to invest, and how can you ensure you get a return on investment to justify the spend?
Worse still, your competitors seem to be making headway, while you can’t seem to gain any traction. You’re worried you’ll be left behind if you don’t take action soon.
If this sounds like you, you’re not alone.
Digitilisation in the mining industry
Back in 2017, the World Economic Forum’s ‘Digital Transformation Initiative: Mining and Metals Industry’ whitepaper found that 82% of managers in the mining industry were planning to invest more in digital and automation technology over the following three years.
Fast forward to 2021, and the mining and metals industry is roughly 30-40% less digitally mature than comparative industries.
Why the disconnect?
The Boston Consulting Group says it’s because mine sites are frequently in remote locations with poor network bandwidth and where rugged terrains make deploying digital sensors difficult. Also, mining workers tend to be blue collar and therefore often less familiar with digital solutions. There are also cultural factors – resistance to change; worries about technology replacing people.
Add to this that sadly, despite many metallurgists and engineers having great ideas when it comes to introducing digital technologies that could to bring value to their site, they are often bogged down, firefighting on the frontline of production critical issues. Resources are stretched thin, and implementation of digital improvements may be done hastily and without forethought for sustainability past the current employee’s tenure.
Mipac’s Optimisation Team Lead, Drew Clements, says that a lot of the time it’s a case of people simply feeling overwhelmed:
“What we see frequently is that people get told to put in an APC (Advanced Process Control System) by their boss and they don’t know what to do, they don’t even know where to start. It’s a huge project.
“There is so much to wrap your head around – like what’s the difference between all the types of APCs? What’s the difference between APC, ARC (Advanced Regulatory Controls), AI (artificial intelligence), deep learning, machine learning, neural networks… The issues we’re talking about are really complex.
“They either don’t know where to start and it all just seems too big, or they don’t know enough about all the technology that exists. Often, it’s both.”
The best way to approach digitalisation
Given it’s all so complicated, we suggest that the best way to proceed is to take heed of the advice of late South African bishop, Desmond Tutu: There is only one way to eat an elephant – one bite at a time.
What does this mean?
It means breaking down the task of digitalisation of your site into smaller, manageable tasks and implementing these gradually.
It means putting in place a roadmap that is right for you – considering your individual requirements and resources (see image below as an example).
Importantly, it also means starting with where the most value can be unlocked in your business and building on this to enable future steps.
Let’s outline what that might look like in four key stages.
The 4 stages of digitalisation
Stage 1 – Discovery visits and desktop reviews (How big is your elephant?)
“We heard an APC is the best thing to put in – can you put one in?”
When you don’t know where to start, jumping right into investing in something as major as an APC – just because that may be what you’ve heard of, or what your competitor has – may not be the best approach.
Instead, a site discovery walk and desktop review can help you ‘define the size of your elephant’, and what kind of equipment best suits your needs.*
As part of this process, it may be worth asking yourself (a) what the problem is that you are trying to solve and (b) what your objectives and desired key results are. For example, are you looking for a way to:
- Improve ways of decision-making through data capture and analysis?
- Improve process stability with improved instrumentation and control?
- Develop the capability of your onsite team?
Depending on your site, you may need a historian, improved instrumentation, soft sensors, a digital twin, an APC system or loop training.
What’s important to remember is that digitalisation applies to every layer of the automation pyramid, from the field level to the management level. Ideally, the idea is to start with the bottom supporting layers and move your way up. After all, no pyramid was ever built from the top down!
It also makes sense to start your digitalisation journey by addressing that which is going to bring the greatest value right now. Digitalisation requires initial financial outlays – no matter where you start – and using the return on your investment from a smaller step change may help you fund (and convince your superiors of the need for) the next stage of your digitalisation journey.
Stage 2 – Grasping the problem (Here’s your fork!)
Once you have an idea of the size of your elephant, it’s time to grab your fork.
Because just like a three-pronged fork, digitalisation can be applied to three distinct areas, all of which can act as bottlenecks to progress:
- Your data
- Your people
- Your plant
Let’s look at each in turn.
Data
Data refers to your business and production intelligence. It’s the information you capture that allows your staff and leaders to make informed decisions based on the best information available.
To capture good data, you first need to have good instrumentation. This may be the place where your digitalisation journey starts. Note that having good instrumentation is not enough. That instrumentation needs to be installed correctly, maintained, calibrated, scaled, etc. As such, your operational discipline/excellence capability and systems need to evolve in line with your instrumentation.
Similarly, so that you can accurately analyse data to enable better decision making, you need to have a well performing historian. Perhaps this is where your bottleneck is.
Identifying how you’re capturing your data currently, and how this is being analysed for insight and foresight, is a great first step. Then, if you’ve identified that data is one of your bottlenecks, it might be worth investigating products like Mipac’s MPA platform, which set ‘golden state’ (or process design) parameters, amongst other things, that help you identify and get back on track when your plant is operating outside of the ideal range.
People
When it comes to digitalisation, many people don’t know what good looks like. They may never have worked on a site that’s more digitally advanced, or seen the positive impact that increased digitalisation can have on their individual work. Thus, they can be unsupportive and resistant to change in the form of greater digitalisation.
The good news is that once people know what good looks like, they are more likely to work with new digital tools, rather than against them. They also have something to work towards. And they can act as ambassadors for other team members who may not be sure about the benefits of digitalisation.
If you think people are your bottleneck, consider investing in change leadership so that your people own the change effort and can evolve the solution long after the digitalisation project team disbands. Change leadership can include options such as:
- Creating a multi-disciplinary change team of emerging leaders
- Educating the change team on models that can help accelerate change and provide the tools to champions to foster a good culture that facilitates change
- Having the change team visit other sites and/or other sectors to benchmark
- Engaging partners, like Mipac, who specialise in understanding the technology landscape, providing 24/7 remote support, delivering e-learning modules or supplying project management software
Plant
When it comes to your plant, there are many potential roadblocks – or bottlenecks – for the digitalisation journey.
Importantly, and regardless of your site, the resources of equipment, people and time are limited, and your greatest challenge may well be identifying the best place to unlock your constraints given the resources that you have.
Depending on your resources, you might want to review your plant stability, starting with upgrading your instrumentation to be more digital and working your way through to putting in an ARC system.
Stage 3 – Slicing up the problem (Here’s your knife!)
Whilst looking at the automation pyramid layers can help you better understand which parts of your business could be aided by digitisation, you don’t have to address each layer completely before moving onto the next. For example, you don’t need to have digitised all the sensors in your plant before you can start looking at your control system.
Instead, we suggest taking horizontal and vertical slices, focused on what is going to deliver you the most value, and the best return on investment, right now (see image below).
At Mipac, our philosophy is to begin by making the minimum investment possible to unlock the greatest value as quickly as possible. Once value is realised, it is feasible then to either distribute the value to stakeholders or reinvest the value to unlock subsequent bottlenecks. Our default position is to commence work at the system bottleneck and then systematically and sequentially follow the bottleneck, unlocking value across the value chain.
Stage 4 – Beyond the solution (Would you like dessert with your elephant?)
Whilst embarking on the journey of digitalisation may seem like a mammoth task (pun intended), it could be the key to unlocking some latent potential in your operation.
At Mipac, we pride ourselves on going beyond the solution, and our optimisation engineers – engaged by both small and large scale operations to guide them through their digitalisation journey – frequently see and can take advantage of hidden opportunities that unlock value for our clients (see case studies below).
If you would like help setting up your digitalisation roadmap, require a gap analysis or simply want to chat with someone about where to start, get in touch with one of our optimisation engineers today or find out more on our Process Optimisation page.
Or you may choose to start smaller as your operational discipline evolves to operational excellence: focusing on alarm management, short interval control or task management software, like MPA and TCard.
Case Study 1
Mipac was engaged to solve a leaching problem on a client site in Africa. This was a process control strategy change and improvement to reduce acid consumption. Once there, it became evident that there was a metallurgical issue on another unit operation of the circuit which, if fixed, would improve quality and reduce line costs. The proposed solution had been tried before but it had lacked the control system to support it. Mipac’s expertise in control systems enabled precise control and drove down reagent cost. Our client’s words were “I expected the control strategy, I didn’t expect to get the metallurgy support as well” |
Case Study 2
Our Process Optimisation team was approached by a client with a semi-automatic control strategy that still incorporated manual sampling. Our process engineer, having been exposed to the latest innovations and technology, suggested a slight adjustment to the strategy and implemented just one instrument into the circuit, which automated the whole circuit and removed the manual sampling requirement, freeing up operator time and reducing the potential for human error. |
At Mipac, we can work with you to come up with your personalised roadmap to digitalisation and provide you with the tools and support to start your journey considering your unique ambition, budget and timeline.
Which part of the elephant will you focus on first?
P.S. No actual elephants were harmed in the writing of this article.
*Our Process Optimisation team can conduct a discovery visit and desktop review with you if required, giving you the added benefit of 25 years of industry experience. Find out more about our approach to process optimisation here.
**Image source: Rahman, Moksadur & Fentaye, Amare & Zaccaria, Valentina & Aslanidou, Ioanna & Dahlquist, Erik & Kyprianidis, Konstantinos. (2021). A Framework for Learning System for Complex Industrial Processes. 10.5772/intechopen.92899.
