Case Study

Connecting the Dots of Digital Transformation toEmpower Self-Sufficiency
Key Facts

Company: Rustenburg Platinum
Mines Limited (Anglo AmericanPlatinum)
Website: www.angloamerican
platinum.com
Industry: Metals & Mining
Country: South Africa
Products Used:• j5 Operations ManagementSolutions
Key Benefits:• Centralized human entered data
• Easy to configure, maintain andscale to multiple sites• Saves valuable time for operatorsand super users• Reduces the need to purchaseexpensive point solutions frommultiple vendors

In many ways, platinum production is governed by extremes and contradicting
laws. Platinum is used in everything from the mundane to the rare — from
catalytic converters to silicone bakeware, jewelry to cancer drugs and fertilizer
to medical implants. Demand for platinum is high, growing, and crosses multiple
industries. Anglo American Platinum, the largest platinum producer in the world,
is responsible for 37% of the world’s platinum production. Platinum mines remove
huge amounts of rock from the earth to extract tiny bits of platinum. Anglo
American Platinum typically mines 2.6 tons of rock to get just 1 gram of platinum.
Platinum producers must extract every bit of platinum they can from their loads
even those invisible to the naked eye. Anglo American Platinum can extract
platinum that’s only 5 microns large — that’s the size of a spec on an ant’s eye. Ina typical year Anglo American Platinum produces around 68 tons of platinum. In
2020, even with COVID-19 related limitations, they produced 37 tons of platinum. Allof this requires an army of processes working together effectively and efficiently
and that’s where digitalization comes into play.

The Problem
As Warren Armstrong a Control Technology Specialist at Anglo American Platinum
explained in his talk at HxGn LIVE evolve720 in 2021, digitalization is nothing
new, but the techniques, tools, depth and pace of digitalization today are vastlydifferent. Anglo American Platinum began their journey toward digitilizationby connecting their process systems with their big data collectors and data
generators. While that covered a lot of important information it did not cover
everything. One symptom of the lack of comprehensive data interoperability within
Anglo American Platinum was the rampant proliferation throughout operationsof vital spreadsheets housing human and manually entered data. As Warrenexplained, spreadsheets are the “digital duck tape that patches the holes in yoursystem.” So Anglo American Platinum switched their focus to removing the duck
tape and fixing the holes.
“What we’re now looking for is the human data, the ad hoc messy spreadsheets,the ingrained ones… with built-in process knowledge, … [the] human systems…
that are all over the place in the plant, tracking little changes from year to year.”“We want to capture those and be able to actually expand them and show themto other people.” “This data… is very valuable, so are theprocesses [behind] it but integration is time consuming,difficult to build and maintain. If you’ve got a big system,
it’s worth the effort [but] when you have lots of these littlethings it’s a huge amount of effort for a tiny little bit ofdata. It becomes not sustainable at all.”
As Warren points out, the point of digitalization is to makeinformation usable and reusable — “what you leave behindneeds to be sustainable and maintainable” and it needs
to be simple — throwing an app at every issue just leadsto app proliferation which, as Warren points out, “soonbecomes very confusing and frustrating for everyone in theplant, especially if you’ve got someone actually trying torun the plant and they have to dig through tens of apps andthings to put data in different places”. “You need to findmore of a system where you can give people the power todo the work themselves, their own digitization, somethingthat is flexible and natively integrates.”

The Solution
As Warren explains, Anglo American Platinum’s principle
for their solution was simple: “Let the people who know theprocess best actually build up the systems and do theirown digitization. Because there’s no way you’re gonna know
better than they do, they work there every day.”That philosophy became the driving theme of theirimplementation. Anglo American Platinum began slowlyby implementing j5 Operations Management Solutions (j5OMS) at five sites to gather the human and ad hoc data
scattered throughout their operations and interface it with
their PI System™ from OSIsoft™¹, SQL databases, custom
websites and other operational data sources. AngloAmerican Platinum has found j5 OMS — with its patented
spreadsheet-like configuration environment — to be aflexible and robust solution for collecting and connecting
their human data, centralizing ad hoc information,
managing scheduled tasks, enhancing shift handovers andmaintaining management of change. “[It’s] easy to use, hasa great, deep, rich feature set which you can get going withquite quickly,” said Warren. “In some ways, [it’s] similar toExcel which is a great starting point for people onsite or
someone to learn because they’re very familiar with Excel.”

The Benefits
Although still early in their deployment, Anglo American
Platinum has already seen benefits from their initial
deployments and an exponential growth in j5 OMS
adoption. Operations have been simplified and, in somecases, entire systems have been eliminated. For example,
on one shift log, before using j5 OMS, operators had toenter 41 entries each day on spreadsheet on a shared drive.
Now operators use a j5 IndustraForm® Template that has
built-in interoperability with the PI System and only needto enter 12 values. The shift log is easier to find too. “Andthe most important thing on this…” Warren says, “that form
was actually built by the site.”
And that was just one benefit. Six j5 IndustraForm
Template instances replaced a custom website for manual
data entry. “When you can decommission a piece ofsoftware,” Warren says, “it’s actually a really great feeling.”
In three months, using j5 OMS, Anglo American Platinum
implemented a full management of change process at asmelter. The new solution is traceable and auditable andconnects with Microsoft® Power BI for reporting and it canbe easily expanded to other sites.
But, as with every good system, the initial deployment
is not the end. As Warren explains, “Operations… arecontinuously changing... and they need to change toextract the most, highest, amounts of efficiency.” Thatmeans the systems you put in place and the tools you
use need to adapt and grow with you. “Today’s issues andwatch lists are not tomorrows, they change continuously
so your systems actually need to keep up.” “If a plant needsa change done, they need it right away. They can’t wait twodays for a developer or to log a call to get a change. It’s notpractical.” You need to “empower your end users. Find thetools, provide the systems for them and the infrastructureso that they can actually use those tools well.”

1 OSIsoft is now part of AVEVA™

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