One of the leading providers of mining software and consulting services to metals, minerals and mining industries, CASPEO, has announced the availability of data analytics tools in its metallurgical accounting solution, INVENTEO.
Metal accounting is one of the main tools for management of metal production industry. It aims to get the most complete and accurate picture of the performance of a plant in order to guide decision making. It combines financial challenges linked to corporate governance and regulations and technical ones regarding process optimisation. Metallurgical accounting systems enhance production and inventory data along the mining value chain. However, collect and aggregate data from various sources is not sufficient to provide a reliable metal accounting system.
Mining companies are required to report accurate and precise data for financial accounts: recoveries and grades, quantity of saleable metals, accurate estimates of inventories (work in progress, intermediate products, stockpiles, etc.). Due to production variability, process inefficiencies, forecasting errors, these tasks are very challenging without an efficient and reliable system to quantify material movements, losses/gains, and emissions.
Thus, the starting point of a true metallurgical accounting system is a precise understanding of the process operations, including the follow-up procedures, based on sampling and measurements. It is common to say about metal accounting software that if it uses bad data, it produces bad results, often summarised as: ‘garbage in, garbage out’.
CASPEO has developed, for more than 15 years, a complete offer, called INVENTEO, to help plant management to switch from spreadsheets or database-driven solution to an efficient metal accounting system pushing mining and metals industry to a next digitalisation level. Designed for mining, mineral processing, hydrometallurgy, smelting, and refining operations, INVENTEO is quite differentiating in the market.
“The application of the AMIRA code P754 that fixes best practices for implementing reliable metal accounting systems is not only linked to the use of a given software package, whatever qualities it may get or functionalities it may provide,” commented Marie-Véronique Durance, CASPEO Co-Managing Director. “That is why we offer, in addition to software, the associated expertise on sampling and measurement which enables the client to be guided towards good practices and to optimise internal processes.”
Metal accounting platforms performs automatic acquisition of data from existing databases (SCADA, LIMS, Historians, etc.) to create a single basis data to manage metallurgical balance accessible by financial, mining, metallurgy, and operational divisions. True metal accounting systems such as INVENTEO do more by improving data quality thanks to robust data reconciliation algorithms. This represents a milestone in Smart Mining.
“INVENTEO’s embedded algorithm allows obtaining consistent material balance from raw data, improving the accuracy of data by a statistical distribution of measurement errors based on maximum of probability, and allowing data quality checking,” added Stéphane Brochot, CASPEO Co-Managing Director. “Measurement and sampling errors are associated with all material flows and stocks in the plant: products, raw materials, utilities, reagent and effluents.”
INVENTEO ensures traceability and workflowall in compliance with the best practice of AMIRA code. The data reconciliation being based on the measurement error, it includes tolerances about the acceptable imbalances. INVENTEO allows to define range of expected values and generate warning when out of it.
All generated data – basis data and reconciled data – are stored in the INVENTEO database with intermediate calculations allowing auditing. All reports are generated from these data. INVENTEO delivers metal balances for all the streams, metallurgical inventories and work-in-progress, in quantity and quality.
Having the right information, in a single place and at the right time; this is what decision-makers are asking for. It is why CASPEO has decided to boost the reporting part of its metallurgical accounting software by adding business intelligence features. To turn data into insights, a system has been developed that makes it possible to directly query the INVENTEO database and thus to easily create more visual reports (tables, graphs or dashboards). INVENTEO encourages sharing of information, while maintaining the levels of privacy and security that are needed. Thanks to this feature, it can be now interfaced with Business or Operational Intelligence solutions such as Power BI, PI Vision, Tableau. It also facilitates the implementation of Extract Transform and Load (ETL) process, to integrate the produced data in larger data warehouses and make it available for business analysis at a wider scale.
INVENTEO also allows the generation of timely reports (month-to-date, quarter-to-date) in addition to fix periods ones attached to financial and legal purposes. It provides stakeholders insights in a timely manner to monitor and assess an operational situation. INVENTEO enables to make faster and better decision.