copper smelter management and control

Case Study

Copper Smelter Management and Operations Control

Anglo American Chile, a division of Anglo American PLC Base Metals, registers an annual production of 631,500 tons of fine copper (including participation in Doña Inés de Collahuasi mining). With reported annual profits of US$ 800 million is Chilean second largest private copper producer.

The Chagres Smelter Division is a modern ISO 14,001 certified copper smelting plant with an annual capacity of 165,000 tons and an over 95% sulphur capture. It was granted the 2005 Good Enterprise Citizen Award.

Challenge

As part of its reorganization processes aimed to significantly increase production, it became unavoidable to speed up both operational management and control. The process to manually gather, validate, organize and report management information entailing more than one single process demanded an amount of human resources and technical effort not compatible with current management models and far from matching new efficiency goals.

Solution

Chagres Smelter decided to take advantage of Progress Sonic ESB, which was implemented and available as a corporate solution.

By means of Navix analysis and assessment it was possible to establish a SOA model process directly integrating PHD, Ellipse, and BART operational systems and a series of Office documents. This integration allowed a rapid business operational intelligence tier implementation.

Benefits

Quickly, Chagres Smelter experimented concrete improvement in the following aspects:
Agility

Improved management variables visibility and traceability
Better variable consistencies
More time available for analysis and decision making
Information availability when requested

Cost Reduction

Availability of both human and technical resources for alternate job requirements.

Risk Reduction

More available time for business and less clerical time demand.
More opportunities for improvements and optimization
Better decision making