Kansanshi Mining PLC in Zambia (a subsidiary of First Quantum Minerals) and Glencore McArthur River mine in the Australian Northern Territory have engaged Mipac to deploy eLearning packages for the plant-specific control systems to support their operations and maintenance staff.
Mipac’s success in training plant personnel across a number of sites comes from the ability to deliver operation specific control system application training courses across a range of PLC, SCADA and DCS systems. Most vendor training courses are generic and not customised to site-specific standards and applications.
Mipac also provides training on advanced topics such as Control Loop Tuning through a combination of standard theory as well as plant-specific examples.
“Face to face training may be considered the ideal way to transfer knowledge, however in our experience, we realise that it may not be the best value option when it comes to remote sites.”
Mipac recognises the pitfalls in the conventional face-to-face training option including:
- Travel and accommodation costs for a trainer to be at site. This usually forms a substantial portion of the overall training costs
- A need to have all course participants available for the course at the same time. This is an issue where most site staff are on rosters
- Training new staff members is an issue if training can be conducted only at certain time of the year, or if a course was just completed
- Difficult to organise a ‘refresher course’ for those who had completed a course in the past
Mipac developed the eLearning courses to eliminate the above constraints as part of our ongoing commitment to better-servicing clients through innovative solutions.
“The course experience is great. It goes beyond the plain audio-visual explanation of concepts. The participant is able to point and click the exact same control system graphics they are used to.
Also incorporated are competency tests at the end of each module to ensure the concepts are well understood before moving on to the next stage.”
Kansanshi Mining PLC eLearning course is for a plant-wide control system application based on the Siemens SIAMTIC PCS7 DCS system. For Glencore McArthur River Mine, Mipac is delivering three separate courses ranging from basic overview to advanced troubleshooting, on their Yokogawa Centum VP R5 DCS system.
Mipac’s eLearning courses allow supervisors to track the number of participants and their individual progress, making it convenient to monitor and report KPIs.
eLearning courses can be hosted as a completely online version, where the course can be accessed anywhere using a standard web browser.
Mipac also provides a locally hosted solution where the application runs on a dedicated server on the plant network and can be accessed via the intranet.
Mipac’s remote engineering services along with the eLearning modules ensure that remote plant operations are well supported and have access to control system application experts round the clock.
