Scada standardisation brings uniform benefits

In the late 1990s, obsolescence of existing systems challenged the wider De Beers group with the necessity of upgrading the plant-wide Scada systems at multiple Southern African operations.

In the late 1990s, obsolescence of existing systems challenged the wider De Beers group with the necessity of upgrading the plant-wide Scada systems at multiple Southern African operations.

In response, the group launched "Project Phoenix" to harness group synergies in mitigating production risk and exploiting the opportunities provided by modern Scada technology and group standardisation.

Key stakeholders from within and outside the group collaborated to reformulate group best practice and define requirements aimed at enhancing system capabilities and data integrity.

Through a process of stringent technical and other evaluations, Citect was selected to meet these requirements.

The resulting collaborative partnership between De Beers TSS and Citect Professional Services, empowered the technical team to engineer a group-wide standard, taking cognisance of the individual mine requirements in respect of reliability and maintainability.

Sound project management principles, quality assurance and vigorous testing procedures allowed the team to roll-out the system to nominated mining operations with minimum downtime and improved production efficiencies.

CitectScada, Plant2Business and Professional Services were used throughout the project to deliver a total low-risk solution which eliminated downtime, significantly lowered life-cycle costs and presented real-time quality information for a better decision-making process to increase plant performance.

For more than a century, the name "De Beers" has been synonymous with diamonds.

The company leads the world in diamond exploration, mining, recovery, sorting, valuation and marketing.

De Beers produces about 45% by value, of the total annual global diamond production from its mines in South Africa, and through its 50:50 partnerships with the Governments of Botswana (Debswana) and Namibia (Namdeb).

De Beers' gem mining operations span every category of diamond mining - open pit, underground, alluvial, coastal and under sea - while its exploration programme extends across six continents.

Since the late 1980s, a number of De Beers and Debswana operations had been served reliably by a local supervisory, control and data acquisition (Scada) system provider.

Up until 2003, it provided the computerised operator interface to plants at two of the South African mines - Finsch Mine and Venetia Mine - as well as the Debswana mines - Orapa, Letlhakane and Jwaneng.

In the late 1990s, further development on the software was terminated and these operations found themselves faced by a dwindling support base and the risk of obsolete hardware platforms.

It became clear that the systems would have to be replaced to mitigate the risk of production loss.

This resulted in an opportunity to harness group synergies in minimising risk, exploiting technology, creating economies of scale and common group standards.

Fortunately, necessity of these replacements was sweetened by the improved functionality and performance that modern technology could bring to the plant information and optimisation environment.

The implementation of a replacement initiative led to two multidisciplinary workshops in April and June 2000, attended by production, control and instrumentation, IT and engineering stakeholders from the various operations.

The first workshop created a mutual understanding of the challenges faced and served to confirm the business sense of a collaborative approach to the existing system replacements.

The second workshop yielded a high level project execution plan for the envisaged control system replacements, as well as a detailed project execution plan for the needs and requirements, concept exploration and definition and validation phases of the projects.

A DebTech team of control system specialists was engaged to manage the project, which became known as the Phoenix Project.

This first phase of the Phoenix Project, the equivalent of a feasibility study in multidisciplinary project terms, was a team effort between DebTech, the operations and the engineering support services of the group corporate headquarters (CHQ).

A fine balance had to be maintained between generic tasks, (for example product and vendor evaluations) and the four streams of mine-specific activities.

This phase of the project began in the third-quarter of 2000 with the generation of site-specific user requirement specifications (ROCs) and culminated at the end of 2001 having produced recommendations for both Scada product and system integrators, a detailed design for each new system as well as estimates for implementation, (totalling over R30 million across the sites).

The old Scada system had various 3rd party system interfaces, which indicated that the replacement would not be very simple.

In addition, the production stakeholders pushed for no downtime during the replacement period.

This highlighted one of the major risks of the project: downtime to production.

By the time the feasibility phase of the Phoenix project was concluded, implementation had already begun at Finsch mine, and initiated at the Orapa, Letlhakane, Jwaneng Recrush and Venetia in January 2002.

Replacement of the final legacy system, at the Jwaneng MTP is in the final stages of handover, at time of writing.

As it emerged, all four independent enquiry and adjudication processes resulted in a common selection in terms of both product (CitectScada) and systems integrator (Industrial Systems Integrators or ISI).

Prior to the placement of the 2002 orders, ISI was acquired by the Australian parent company and developer of the CitectScada system, thus becoming Citect Professional Services.

This acquisition resulted in the injection of international expertise into the project and provided De Beers and Debswana with an appropriate blend of local and international skills and best practice as well as a more direct route to core CitectScada developers, which is internationally recognised as one of the top products in its class.

As was the case for phase 1, an appropriate blend was struck between site-specific accountability and group collaboration through the formation of a DebTech based project engineering team.

The final accountability for each individual project alliance with the project managers at Finsch Mine, Venetia Mine, Jwaneng Mine and Orapa and Letlhakane Mines.

The emergence of a single product and system integrator has facilitated the furthering of best practice, surging across the operations in terms of standardisation and common engineering across the sites.

This developed into a collaborative partnership between De Beers TSS and Citect Professional Services.

These synergies are managed with the assistance of a Phoenix Steering Committee, represented from CHQ, Citect and the mining operations, under the chairmanship of the overall Phoenix Sponsor.

In conclusion, the project was a huge success, it caused very little downtime - none on some of the sites.

Citect provided full project management.

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