Tag Archives: inventory management

WesTrac to deploy Palantir Technologies’ Foundry across Component Rebuild Centres, Inventory Management teams

Palantir Technologies and WesTrac, one of the world’s largest Caterpillar dealers and leading provider of heavy mobile equipment and aftermarket services to the Australian mining and construction sectors, have announced a multi-year enterprise expansion of their partnership, which first began in 2021, to deploy Foundry across core operations.

The expanded partnership will initially focus on deploying Foundry across WesTrac’s Component Rebuild Centres and to Inventory Management teams, to drive greater overall efficiency and customer delivery for WesTrac, Palantir says.

Palantir’s Foundry operating system is being used to help increase throughput of WesTrac’s Component Rebuild Centre at its headquarters in Perth, Western Australia, and is being expanded to the Company’s Tomago facility, in New South Wales. Foundry is used daily by workshop planners and supervisors to improve task scheduling decisions, manage upcoming part constraints, and increase labour efficiency through proactive alerting on task performance and schedule adherence. Foundry will also be leveraged by WesTrac’s Inventory Management teams to identify deficits in available inventory that may block workshop progress, enabling the team to make more proactive ordering decisions, Palantir says.

Jarvas Croome, CEO at WesTrac, said: “In the current technology-rich era, WesTrac has a strong focus on incorporating enhanced data-driven decisions across our business as we look to drive our own digital transformation and improve delivery of Cat® products in Australia. Implementing Foundry has delivered a strong initial return on investment, and we anticipate the five-year expansion of our partnership with Palantir will enhance return on investment and enable more data-driven decisions. The Foundry platform has been a leading feature within WesTrac, with rapid uptake, high usability and widespread acceptance by users across the business.

“As we expand the scope of Foundry, including to new applications like artificial intelligence (AI) solutions, we expect uptake of Palantir’s products to increase. WesTrac is committed to providing world-class products and services to our customers by ensuring operations are supported by the latest technology, which is why we are pleased be extending our partnership with Palantir.”

Ashwin Rajan, Head of Commercial for Australia at Palantir, said Foundry is now serving as the digital twin for WesTrac’s core operations, delivering tangible business benefits.

“The suite of software in Foundry help front-line Component Rebuild Centre & Inventory Teams improve overall efficiency and customer delivery,” he said. “For example, in just the last six months, Foundry has identified a significant number of constrained parts blocking work order progress – and suggested remediation strategies to ensure continued operations. WesTrac predicts these outcomes alongside improvements in inventory management will drive overall throughput up by at least 5% over the next five years, with additional benefits expected in other areas such as reduced working capital requirements and improved time to invoice.”

In addition to Foundry, WesTrac plans to explore AI solutions leveraging a suite of software including Palantir’s new Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP). AIP, Palantir says, can allow WesTrac to better connect sales to operations, by enabling sales functions to ask questions of workshop operations, to inform sales strategy and improve the accuracy of information provided to customers.

Sandvik highlights parts supply and management options as it continues predictive maintenance focus

Sandvik Mining & Rock Solutions is offering various parts supply and management options to suit customers’ needs and help facilitate its own corporate focus on predictive maintenance through the flow of real-time data on its equipment.

Among the options, according to Amith Ganasram, Business Line Manager – Parts, Commercial, at Sandvik Mining & Rock Solutions, is Vendor Managed Inventory.

“To streamline the availability of spare parts, our people can be on site with an inventory of stock that we manage,” Ganasram says. “The main advantage here is that this makes parts available to the customer at reduced lead times.”

He notes that his team works with the customer’s operational staff on site, as well as with the service teams from Sandvik Mining & Rock Solutions. This means that uptime can be optimised, as the right parts are readily available when they are required.

Alternatively, customers may prefer to opt for a stock model that is based on consignment. Under this arrangement, the customer manages a parts holding on their own site, but they only pay for what they consume.

“We can conduct a regular audit every couple of weeks, for example, to check that the stock level is well balanced with the parts that are actually used,”Ganasram says.

Every effort is made to allow customers to leverage the value of OEM components, as their inherent quality safeguards the lifecycle of machines, minimising any unplanned downtime which could lead to lost production and revenue.

“We make it easy for customers to standardise on OEM parts, by creating bundled offerings when they purchase equipment,” he says. “This allows the customer access to high quality parts at a discount, when they take advantage of a total offering with new equipment.”

Through its advances in fleet data monitoring solutions, Sandvik Mining & Rock Solutions offers customers digital tools to track the performance and condition of their equipment. This includes prediction of key indicators like Mean-Time-Between-Failure, so that servicing and parts supply can be better planned. All these factors contribute to safer and smoother operations, with the lowest total cost of ownership for operating equipment, it says.

RPMGlobal’s SaaS model enhanced with IMAFS and Shift Manager cloud-based transitions

RPMGlobal says it has accelerated the transition of its product suite to the cloud, releasing two new cloud offerings to the market.

The company’s IMAFS™ inventory optimisation and Shift Manager™ operational management solutions have now made the transition, the company said.

IMAFS uses artificial intelligence-based algorithms to enhance inventory management and forecasting accuracy for miners. It connects to an organisations ERP, enabling operations to continuously improve the accuracy of parts availability, reduce inventories, decrease stockouts and reduce equipment downtimes, according to the company.

Transitioning IMAFS from a hosted solution in the cloud to a full Software as a Service (SaaS) model will provide users with greater flexibility in security and authentication, RPMGlobal claims. As a result of the shift to the cloud, customers can now continuously optimise their inventory management processes.

“The move to the cloud has as an array of benefits, including increased ease of use, as users now only need a browser to access the IMAFS software,” RPMGlobal says. “Other benefits include high levels of scalability and availability, a modern API interface, faster deployment time and improved cost effectiveness.”

Shift Manager, meanwhile, is a short-term task planning and execution solution that enables users to collaborate and communicate through a single, integrated plan. The software allows users to manage tasks and resource allocations to drive more effective on-shift decision making and greater compliance to plan, according to the company.

As a cloud-enabled hosted solution, users are able to execute short-term shift planning through a single, integrated, web-based application without the need to be physically on site, the company says. Other benefits include enhanced security and collaboration across departments and a rapid implementation methodology that includes several pre-built integration points.

RPMGlobal Chief Technology Officer, Paul Beesley, says cloud adoption will help the industry unlock additional productivity and sustainability improvements.

“Cloud applications facilitate remote collaboration and the scalability that mining organisations require while creating robust data storage solutions that are more cost-efficient when compared to outdated hardware,” he said.

“Our products have been designed to leverage the tools and services available on the cloud platforms to rapidly build enhanced solutions for our customers. The transition to a full cloud offering across our full product portfolio is being enabled due to our above industry average investment in research and development and we look forward to continuing our progress in releasing more cloud offerings to the market soon.”

RPMGlobal Chief Executive Officer, Richard Mathews, added: “The company is committed to investing in technical innovation to enable customers to operate their mines as efficiently as possible.

“With more customers adopting a remote-operating business strategy through technology enablement, our work to migrate other products to a complete SaaS model will ramp up as we strive to add additional value for our present and future customers.”

RPMGlobal looks for increased XPAC, IMAFS market share with supported language adds

RPMGlobal says it has expanded the reach of its industry-leading planning and scheduling software, XPAC Solutions, adding Chinese to the list of supported languages.

XPAC commodity-based solutions support multiple mining methods for both open pit and underground operations including metals mines, bulk commodities, oil sands, diamonds, potash and quarrying.

Building on a recent major upgrade that marked the introduction of hybrid scheduling, the latest releases of XPAC Solutions is focused on supporting the increasing user base with additional language support features, the company said.

The mine planning solution now supports five languages (English, French, Spanish, Russian and Chinese) across its commodity-specific mining software suite.

These language enhancements come as the company’s client base continues to expand, with the latest language compatibility upgrade designed to strengthen Chinese operations using the software, according to the company.

David Batkin, RPMGlobal’s Executive Manager, Product Strategy, said: “With the rapid growth of our solution footprint, we are committed to ensuring we invest in true internationalisation, helping our global customer base maximise the value they receive from our solutions”.

RPMGlobal has also added language support for its newly acquired inventory optimisation management software tool, IMAFS. IMAFS is an inventory management and forecasting software solution that uses proprietary artificial intelligence algorithms to greatly improve inventory management, the company says.

In the latest release of IMAFS, the product now supports three languages (Spanish, Portuguese and Russian), ensuring the product’s customer base has a “seamless user experience in regions speaking those languages”, it said.

Other enhancements to IMAFS include a new user interface, making it easier than before to use the software, along with improved visualisation of frequency, usage multiples and lead times.

Commenting on the addition of the new language support, Batkin said the company prides itself on offering comprehensive global multi-lingual support for its products that meets the needs of its global customer base.

“Along with further advancements to our mining software, we anticipate the expansion of more language offerings across our software suite to ensure we are delivering enhanced value to our global customer base,” he said.

RPMGlobal says its software offering is deployed all over the world and is supported by 24 offices globally.

RPMGlobal futureproofs inventory management for miners

RPMGlobal has completed the acquisition of IMAFS, adding a cloud delivered, inventory management and forecasting software solution to a suite of technology solutions that use proprietary artificial intelligence algorithms to greatly improve inventory management.

IMAFS analyses inventory data from corporate Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems to deduce the optimal timeframe for inventory orders, costs, and order frequency. It supports not only several forecasting methods, but also takes advantage of AI and machine-learning capabilities to optimise the calculation of the key variables in inventory management, RPMGlobal says.

The ‘forward looking’ predictive algorithms become particularly powerful when used in conjunction with RPMGlobal’s asset management system, AMT, the company added. AMT uses a Dynamic Life Cycle Costing engine that forecasts, in real time, every maintenance event for a piece of equipment, at a component level, until the end of its economic life.

The future demand of an organisation’s assets, combined with the optimisation algorithms within IMAFS, are the critical pieces of the puzzle to optimise procurement and management of critical parts and components, according to RPMGlobal.

“The delivery of an integrated AMT and IMAFS offering delivers an industry-first, predictive solution with more certainty of the future and less reliance on historical data,” it said.

ERP systems typically use historical consumption to predict future requirements, which, according to RPMGlobal, has its limitations in a volatile maintenance and repair focused industry such as mining.

“This future demand knowledge will further improve the accuracy of parts availability, reducing inventories, decreasing stockouts and reducing equipment downtimes,” it said.

IMAFS has been proven in industry, according to RPMGlobal, with one operation reducing 78% of stockouts for items with high usage, while concurrently reducing stock levels by 14% for the items controlled by IMAFS. Another operation was able to reduce global inventory by 15% within the first 10 months without any diminution of service levels.

RPMGlobal Chief Executive Officer, Richard Mathews, said: “The company is leading the way in the practical application of innovative technology that increased miners’ operational competitiveness. With our growing suite of optimisation products, RPMGlobal has built a capacity to help global operations extract more value where it counts. We are excited to be utilising AI technologies to improve the efficiency of mining operations across the asset management function.”

He added: “We intend to build on this AI capability by including additional variables in the models that may impact availability for our customers operating in remote locations. This experience will also assist us as we look to use these same advanced techniques to further optimise mine planning and scheduling.”