Inductive Automation Blog

Travis, Kevin, and Kent are back for an all-new and evolved Build-a-Thon! This time, instead of keeping the glory all for themselves, Travis and Kevin will each be coaching a new competitor from two of the top integration companies in the Ignition community, Vertech and Flexware, to compete for the Build-a-Thon belt. Join us at this year’s jam-packed, live-streamed competition for bigger fun, bigger laughs, and bigger builds as the competitors build “next-gen” versions of an HMI and dashboard, using their own newly developed Ignition Exchange resource.

Project Overview

The plant needed to extract information from its Siemens PCS7 redundant systems. It also needed to use that information to obtain important data such as key performance indicators (KPIs), production indices availability, rate of consumption of electric power, and metallurgical tracking. This is all to monitor the status of the plant for data process optimization.

Ignition is being used as an Industrial Information System and allows Constancia to obtain KPIs for daily production, maintenance, downtime, and equipment operation. It helps the production team to quickly find problems that prevent it from achieving optimal production.

The system also allows users to perform detailed analysis and provide solutions as well as to schedule the production to compare it with actual values.

Given the integrated and historical information with the Ignition Constancia system, it is passed to the stage of development of various reports and different analysis, monitoring, and trending screens. Reports are made of production, maintenance, energy consumption and other factors.

The most important reports are the daily report on production, maintenance and monitoring of stops related to the main plant machinery such as mills, operations, crusher, and monitoring data of metallurgical and electrical areas.

Also, we work in a mobile system that shares the same tags that were extracted from the PCS7 Siemens system. This is a great tool for a staff that is distributed throughout the plant performing diagnostics on different equipment.

The average number of daily connected clients is about 50 people who use the system for monitoring data and the mobile system for different areas.

One aspect that is special about this project is the integration of production data, monitoring stops, data monitoring electricity, compared to major plant equipment, as facilitated to obtain important data such as the rate of equipment availability, energy consumption index, KPI daily, weekly and monthly production, metallurgical data — all of which is used for planning the day-to-day production.

All areas at Constancia (Production, Control, Maintenance, Metallurgy, IT) are now working together based on Ignition. The mine uses the data as a pillar of its production. The data helps decision-makers optimize production, consumption, and availability.