Interlate has partnered up with Newcrest Mining to provide expert decision support and near real-time productivity improvement services to the mining company’s operations in Australia and Papua New Guinea, the Australia-based service provider said.
The company’s productivity improvement service combines mining expertise, data science and Internet of Things-based technology. Interlate operates from its Operations Intelligence Centre in Brisbane, Australia.
Craig Jetson, Executive General Manager Lihir (PNG) and Cadia (Australia), said: “We are pleased to announce our partnership with Interlate to deliver their near real-time monitoring solution for our operations. Remote support that leverages advanced data analytics is a key part of our operational improvement strategy — Interlate’s SentinelTM service is the solution we were looking for, enabling those improvements to be sustained in the future.”
Jetson explained that the ability to rapidly identify significant value-adding initiatives was one of the reasons it signed an agreement with Interlate. “Given their experience in remote monitoring, their solution provides us a ‘safe on-ramp’ into this space, without closing the door on developing our own capabilities in this area internally in the future.”
David Meldrum, CEO of Interlate, said: “Working together, Newcrest and Interlate have already discovered significant productivity improvement opportunities in Newcrest’s operations, which could contribute millions of dollars in profit each year. This value will steadily increase as Newcrest realises further gains from the real-time productivity improvement services.”
In October, Interlate and Siemens signed a memorandum of understanding to help deliver productivity gains for the mining industry, by better leveraging data across the entire mining value chain.
Interlate says its Sentinel solutions plug into a SCADA system and pulls time-critical data into a Data Assimilation Node (DAN) sitting onsite. This DAN streams the data back to Interlate and its data centre.
In the data centre, Interlate conditions the information, display it so it makes sense and has a productivity supervisor monitor it. This supervisor has audio visual collaboration tools, which are connected to the supervisor on site so that both can communicate in real time about what they are seeing.