Mining Company Achieves Zero Downtime SCADA Migration And Proactive Efficiencies With Ignition 

Mining Company Achieves Zero Downtime SCADA Migration And Proactive Efficiencies With Ignition

ASM Standards And Custom Alarm Aggregation Improve Operator Awareness

Project Overview

Leading Western-Australian mining company, Westgold Resources, is known for its dynamic and growth-oriented approach to safety and operational efficiency. When it comes to their historic Bluebird Gold Mine processing plant, well-maintained critical infrastructure, safety, and efficiency have a significant impact on the success of the operations. The Bluebird Gold Mine is a key asset within the Murchison Goldfields, a gold mining area in the Mid West region of Western Australia that has produced over 35 million ounces of gold, in which Bluebird Gold Mine’s production continues to strengthen Westgold’s operations.

Once their existing SCADA solution had reached its end-of-life, Westgold Resources partnered with Pivotal Engineering, an Australian-owned outcomes-based business, and initiated a critical digital transformation of its system. Westgold’s operations required this project to be completed with zero downtime, ensuring production at the iconic Bluebird Mine was not impacted during the SCADA migration.

The new Ignition-based SCADA solution delivers high-performance interfaces and alarming, built on recognised best practices for design and useability, while offering scalability, enhanced operational safety, and a future-proof solution able to support the growth of the site. 

Challenges

Westgold’s Bluebird Mine is a key asset with major plans for expansion; however, its previous process control system had reached end-of-life, hindering progress while presenting several risks.

Westgold suffered from limited scalability due to a restrictive tag count and a limited number of user licenses. This forced users to share logins and prevented supervisors and engineers from gaining independent access to real-time data and analysis as a result of the legacy SCADA’s high licensing cost framework.

By updating the existing outdated user interface, Pivotal Engineering was able to step away from traditional, overly-colourful screens that failed to prioritise critical information. These screens had become inefficient and were fostering a reactive operational model that was not suitable for preemptively addressing warnings.

A key aspect of the reactive approach from operators came from the fact that alarms lacked standardised descriptions and presentation. This frequently limited operators’ focus on these alarms and enabled them to instead shift into ‘noise in the background’, which made it difficult for operators to proactively resolve critical or safety issues that may arise.

Lastly, Westgold Resources needed more than just a replacement SCADA system; they required a new standard of process control. One that could be easily adopted and rolled out across other mines sites and processing plants, ensuring consistency and simplified maintenance of the solution.

As Bluebird Mine operates on a 24-hour basis, the need for operational continuity was fundamental to the success of the project. By running Ignition alongside the existing solution, they were able to build out the project alongside the existing SCADA solution. Deployment of the new process control went ahead with ease and no downtime, successfully accomplishing this key goal of the project.

“I came in one morning, logged in, installed it, and had a cup of coffee. About twenty minutes later, we were up and running and trending all of the tags,” noted Chris Murphy, Lead Control Systems Engineer at Pivotal Engineering.

Solution

After Westgold approached Pivotal Engineering with the requests for their Bluebird Mine, Pivotal was able to realise and implement an end-to-end SCADA solution using Ignition, focusing on a seamless migration and modernisation strategy, alongside best practices for control system design.

Pivotal Engineering deployed a redundant Ignition Gateway pair to run in tandem with the legacy solution, ensuring zero downtime during migration. This process allowed for a seamless cutover and provided a safety net during the transition and initial operator training for the new system.

Pivotal Engineering adhered to the Abnormal Situation Management (ASM) Guidelines, which recommended highly strategic colour usage, saving it for critical screens to limit distractions and draw the operators’ attention to alarming conditions. By leveraging Ignition’s Perspective Module, Pivotal implemented a clean, high-performance interface using grayscale to ensure operational efficiency and shift the focus of these screens. The adoption of this new system enabled operators to go from simply monitoring equipment to identifying potential faults and proactively resolving alarms and abnormal situations for increased efficiency and production.

“Their legacy SCADA was reaching end-of-life, and Westgold was driven towards an automated, modernised solution, able to lift their mine site in line with ASM Guidelines,” said Sang Kasare, Control Systems Engineer at Pivotal Engineering.

For a critical site like the Bluebird Mine, Pivotal developed a custom in-house alarm aggregation solution using Ignition’s powerful User Defined Types (UDTs) and the SQL database. This custom solution structures alarms in a hierarchy, allowing operators to follow a trail from high-level area overviews down to the specific piece of equipment that is faulting. This enables operators to maintain operational efficiency and be proactive in fault resolution during alarms.

The addition of custom docked views ensured critical information was always visible, making sure the operators’ view of the plant was never obscured. This process enabled faster information intake and enhanced safety compared with traditional pop-up windows, where key information can be hidden and further limits the information readily available to operators at a glance.

To aid in proactive decision-making, Pivotal Engineering utilised an operator-focused design enhanced with 15-minute trends and spark lines. This approach empowered operators to quickly assess the impact of an input change without navigating away from the main screen.

Ignition comes out-of-the-box with unlimited tags and licensing, which immediately solved the legacy system’s limitations. This advantage enabled all staff to access the system with various levels of control and information availability, without the risk of additional costs for tags and user licences. By implementing Ignition, everyone from operators to engineers can now create their own trends and analyse plant performance, without the added security risk of sharing logins.

Results 

Westgold Resources’ new Ignition system has transformed the operations at Bluebird Mine, with Pivotal Engineering’s dedicated team successfully implementing all key project requirements and delivering unexpected benefits in an easy-to-use, intuitive system.

“It’s a big thing that we’ve seen how user-friendly it is for the team,” said James Hodierne, Group Manager for Electrical and Projects at Westgold Resources.

The ASM-compliant HMI and custom alarm aggregation system have significantly improved operator experience, and Westgold’s team now has clearer alerting allowing them to address issues before they escalate.

“It was the enthusiasm that they had on the project. When they came to the site, they basically wore the Westgold shirt. They were part of us, part of the team, and they’ve done the best for the team,” continued James.

Through this partnership with Westgold Resources, Pivotal Engineering delivered a flexible, future-proof solution that not only solved the immediate issues of the legacy system, but established the historic Bluebird Mine to be safer, more secure, and more efficient than ever. 

Project Team

Pivotal Engineering
Chris Murphy (Lead Control Systems Engineer)
Sang Kasare (Control Systems Engineer)
Chris Ong (Project Engineer)

Westgold Resources
James Hodierne (Group Manager for Electrical and Projects)

Project Scope

Tags: 17,078 total (7,127 OPC tags)
Screens: 18 main views, 11 docked screens
Clients: 8
Alarms: 1,927
Devices Used: 6x Rockwell ControlLogix PLCs, 1x simulation device, 1x Micrologix PLC, 1x Modbus power meter
Architectures Used: Standard redundancy
Databases Used: 4x Microsoft SQL Server
Historical Data Logged: N/A
Number of people on team: 3