RungePincockMinarco (RPM) has launched its new Oil Sands XPAC Solution (OSS) at the annual CIM Convention in Vancouver, Canada. This is the latest commodity based solution to be added to RPM’s suite of scheduling solutions.“We have been working with oil sands operators for over 20 years and the development of OSS is a direct result of our long standing partnership with them and our continued commitment to deliver solutions that tackle the major challenges faced by the oil sands industry,” says Craig Halliday, RPM’s Vice President of Software.
OSS is an end to end scheduling solution that is purpose built for oil sands operations. It streamlines the entire mine scheduling process from geology to scheduling, haulage and product optimisation. “In the past, scheduling solutions have relied on inputs from a number of different data sources. OSS manages scheduling in one place from start to finish. It is now very easy to use the latest geological and haulage information to ensure schedules are accurate and achievable,” explains Alun Philips, RPM’s Product Manager – Scheduling. OSS also integrates directly with XERAS for Enterprise, RPM’s enterprise financial modelling solution. “This integration allows for the seamless transfer of operational information into XERAS, RPM’s financial modelling software product. It also provides the same type of information to flow into the company’s corporate financial or operational systems thereby providing a single source of the truth across the whole business.”
OSS has been built on the industry standard XPAC scheduling engine and is “script-free” which allows schedulers to harness the underlying scheduling power to deliver results quickly. “When schedulers can get to the job of scheduling more quickly, they can spend their time comparing and analysing different mining options. This affords the scheduler and consequently the company a deeper understanding of what the mine is actually capable of. OSS can be implemented in days rather than weeks and as we have found following the implementation of our other commodity based solutions, training time is minimal. In fact, with similar RPM solutions we have already seen a reduction of up to 80% in implementation times when compared to existing systems. It is a cliché but this really is a revolution in scheduling for the oil sands industry and we are very excited to be working with our clients as they implement this new approach across their operations,” says Halliday. The launch of OSS follows the 2013 releases of RPM’s commodity specific scheduling solutions for open pit metals, open cut coal and underground coal.
