MechChem Africa September-October 2023

Five value pillars for mining digitalisation

Erik Pretorius, Global lead for large mining and mineral processing projects at ABB, talks about ABB’s digitalisation roadmap, which the company aims to leverage alongside its physical and digital solutions to deliver value for customers navigating the complex digital solutions landscape.

G iven the mountains of data gener ated by modern mining solutions, it is more important than ever to ensure digital transformation programmes have clarity, pace, and control. To help companies navigate this complex land scape and pursue programmes that deliver on value, ABB has developed a digitalisation roadmap that rests on value pillars. ABB aims to leverage these pillars along side its strengths as a provider of physical and digital solutions. The company works closely with everything from mining robots and trolley-assist systems to AI and augmented reality. ABB’s vision is that automation, digi talisation, and electrification go hand in hand for digital transformation that can deliver real value from sustainable and efficient mining operations. The five pillars – sustainability; asset per formance; process performance; operational excellence; and a connected workforce – can be used to provide demonstratable evidence that digital transformation strategies are working. There is also a horizontal layer: cyber security, which is critical across all five pillars. While the five pillars are based on long held customer needs and the company’s solu tions and domain expertise, they also reflect massive changes in mining in recent years. Another important concept of digitalisation is to promote greater collaboration among different areas of the value chain. The value pillars must all be connected to maximise plant benefits. As an example, predictive maintenance has a solid connection to the sustainability pillar and production. A reliability engineer, who needs to work closely with the production manager, may sometimes face a decision that involves running a piece of equipment close to a failure curve, even though that could result in higher energy consumption. In the end, for a holistic optimisation of the value chain, digitalisation needs to serve as a basis for col laborative working, instead of the traditional siloed way of operating. Data integration is a critical part of prog ress in digitalisation. “With data, it is essential to remember that if we cannot measure, we cannot control. Advanced algorithms cannot

driven projects is still around preparing the data correctly. That is a big hurdle, and mining is no different. Correct use of the technology associated with the right domain expertise is crucial to enable data integration and the five value pillars,” he concludes. go.abb/processautomation

make the right predictions if the basics are not right. For a complex and important proj ect, such as cost reduction, we can dig into millions of data points, but it still needs to be correctly processed, ingested and managed to extract the right value from operations,” says Pretorius. “Most of the time spent in data

ABB’s vision is that automation, digitalisation, and electrification go hand in hand for digital transformation to deliver real value from sustainable and efficient mining operations.

ABB’s five pillars of digitalisation – sustainability; asset performance; process performance; operational excellence; and a connected workforce – can be used to provide demonstratable evidence that digital transformation strategies are working.

36 ¦ MechChem Africa • September-October 2023