Metso Minerals in Sala, Sweden, is a product center for a certain collection of process machines used in the mining industry across the world. The process machines separate the ore and extracts raw materials from it, such as zinc, copper or lead. Approximately 95% of the production is exported. Currently, Metso Minerals in Sala holds about 10 different process machines, some with no control equipment at all, only electric motor, while others are more sophisticated machines with I/O. There are other Metso Minerals units, in York, the United States and in Sydney, Australia where they have other groups of process machines.
Customized complete plants
In Sala they work with both electrical and mechanical design. The designers on the electric design department design and develop control systems for the process machines. PLC-controlled electrical enclosures are used for controlling of the machines.
The business concept is to provide the mines with process machines, but also to customize complete works. They rough-cast different solutions, and figure out which machines to be used. When Metso Minerals in Sala receives orders for completely new works, new mines, they obtain machines from several different Metso companies. But sometimes they need to obtain components from outside Metso, compressors, for example. After delivery of the new work, Metso Minerals maintains and performs services on the delivered equipment. In addition to orders for new works, Metso sometimes receives orders for upgrades of older works, which were sold several years ago. This might mean new machines and new technology.
Currently Metso Minerals in Sala has a very large order in the pipeline, to a mine in Australia. It is becoming increasingly common with larger plants, larger mills and more numbers of process machines. The order for the mine in Australia consists of 28 pieces of pressure filters for dewatering, the largest model. The filter is used to press the water out, and then press air in. Then the material is dried and pressed into "clods". Metso Minerals sells many of those filters, usually 1 filter per customer, but occasionally they sell 3-4 filters to one customer. They rarely sell as many filters to one single customer as to the Australian mine.
Metso Minerals has delivered customized solutions to, inter alia, the LKAB mines in Kiruna and Svappavaara, in the north of Sweden.
Higher quality thanks to database handling
The products from Metso Minerals have a long service life, and therefore it is also important to keep the documentation alive in some way. On the electric design department at Metso Minerals in Sala, the designers have a long history from working in elMaster design, and about 1.5 years ago, they chose to start using elMaster Enterprise. The reason for that was that they wanted to increase the quality of their data, save time and get a better structure. They saw that there were shortcomings in their previous ways of working with drawings.
“A customer could, for example, discover that certain lines/connections were not linked, so the need for a new working method emerged”, says Mats-Ove Tallroth, head of the electric design department at Metso Minerals in Sala. “I used to work with the program earlier, however it was not called Enterprise back then, but nevertheless, it contained database connected layers. You could work with one page, and think that you were really thorough. But when we compiled, you could see that there were a lot of errors. Then you deleted the errors one by one, but in the end, it became difficult to get rid of the last ones. Thanks to Enterprise, it is easier to avoid such problems, since the software is much more user-friendly.”
Thanks to the database handling, they are forced to standardization of the components of the various control equipment to a greater extent than before. The increased quality is easy to explain.
“When we made a change in a circuit diagram before, we had to make the corresponding change in 3-4 other documents as well. Then, you really did not want to lose one of those features. Here we see the obvious benefits of the system”, says Mats-Ove. “If you make a change in a document, the change is updated in the database, and you do not have to do the change more than once.”
In Sala they now have made a review of four of their standard products, those who are considered to be the most frequent. Mats-Ove’s colleagues have manually converted the old design drawings of each of these four machines into the Enterprise environment. Each designer has been responsible for one machine. They have designed the products from scratch, with the old design as a basis. This part is almost completed by now. Mats-Ove has begun to use these documents, and so far he is very satisfied with the results.
“We have had a lot of support along the way, but now you can see the tool in its almost complete form. There is still more to do. You should take into account that you will need about 100-200 hours for the running-in period before you can start using the system effectively. We have been aware of that from the start. But I was pleasantly surprised when I started using the system, and I see enormous benefits from it. One reason why we have chosen to try to get us over this threshold and start working in the Enterprise environment is that we are a bit short on resources right now, and there is much work to do, thanks to good commodity prices. The market is huge. Mines make new investments and new mines are started up. If we have made our lesson, we will, in principle only have to press a button and automate generate a lot of documents. That is something we previously had to do by hand. It has been a long process for various reasons, but it has been worthwhile, now we will soon be able to begin harvesting.”
When all this is done, the designers should be able to use the feature Copy structure, that is, copy the entire structure of the standard product. All the designers should be able to work with all machines; no one is specialized in a certain part. Until a new product is fully launched, respective designer “owns” the standard for his own product, so when the other designers copy “his” structure for a delivery, a project, then they give him feedback regarding the standard. Very soon they can start using the material. When these four products are launched, the designers will do the same thing with 2-3 of their other products.
Wants more time for developing the products
The project with the redrawing of these products has taken slightly more than 1 year. It is not often they invent an entirely new product. Instead, they work to renew their existing products and sometimes they optimize and develop products they have bought in. With Enterprise they hope to have more time to develop the machines strictly regarding control, to programme and perhaps to optimize them, instead of simply producing documents and throw away products. Earlier, they barely had the time to produce the standard documents, but in the future hopefully they will have more time to optimize and to look through the documents, regarding circuit diagrams as well as programs.
“We might get the time to stop and reflect; can we do this differently? We hope to be able to shorten this drawing period. We start to draw the cabinet, then we programme and finally we start up the plant on our customer’s site.”
Support on site
One problem along the way has been that the designers in Sala have not been able to focus on this project completely, during a period of time, because they also have other duties to perform in addition to this project. When they have encountered a problem, they have contacted Ides support. Normally it takes a couple of days for our support department to solve a case. But when the support team comes up with the solution to the problem, the responsible person on Metso might not be in place to receive assistance, because e.g. he/she is on a business trip. If that is the case, it takes even longer for them to get the problem resolved. On Metso Minerals it has been highly appreciated when personnel from Ides have been there to give support on site. That has been very useful.
“We had an “Enterprise-day” when our designers dropped everything else and just concentrated on their own standards to identify problems and record them. Then we sat and drew first, and the next day we received help from Ides, and then the problems could be solved immediately. Bengt Olsson from Ides almost went under because of all our questions. He came here to solve a specific problem, but there were many of us here who wanted to take the opportunity to get help with various problems. I definitely think we could use more of that kind of support, personnel from Ides come here and do hands-on, and solve specific problems on the spot.”
Customer based training
The designers have been in Västerås a few days to be trained by Ides’ Birgitta Strömberg. After that she has been to Metso Minerals in Sala twice. What led to the decision about getting trained, was that Birgitta Strömberg and Anders Sohlin, a consultant from Frimodul, came on visit. They outlined the idea of how Mats-Ove and his colleagues wanted to work with the documentation. The team was notified that their ideas were practicable and in accordance with how Enterprise works.
“It means a lot to us as customers, that you focus on us and our needs, with the possibility of training and supporting on our site. It is really important to have your full attention, and that you focus on your different customers with their different requirements”, says Mats-Ove.
Request for future features of the system
The designers at Metso Minerals in Sala see a need for special features of the system, regarding handling standards for different markets and products. You want to be able to standardize and automate this process as much as possible. But there is however a risk with breaking the standard in so many pieces that it becomes incoherent.
“It would be very interesting if it was possible to solve this rationally. But first we want to launch our current projects, and then we will probably have ideas on how we want to move forward”, says Mats-Ove.
“This sounds very interesting”, says Anders Ekberg, customer manager at Ides. “And I see great opportunities for the customer to take the next step in the system and streamline their operations further by using, for example, ADG, where you can easily reuse and copy different types of solutions and standards.”
ADG is useful if you are a manufacturer of products with different options, since it is important to be able to deal with different solutions. Each solution is depending on the choices made by the customer when ordering. And this affects, in turn, also the contents and appearance of the equipment. With the help of a special configuration tool, Metso Minerals would be able to handle the different solutions in a simple manner. The tool will be linked to Ides software, which then generates the design and related documents.
(idesNews July 2008)