Goals

• To convert one of the complex’s processing plants to handle higher grade coal for purposes other than power generation.
• The main goal was to expand and upgrade the complex to feed a new power station.
• To optimize the two plants to meet the demand of coal for all the power stations.
  

Challenges

• The production team's main challenge was the lack of timely decision-making and protracted delays in picking up production glitches, which impacted on-the-go decision-making.
• Technical staff battled to pin-point faults.

Results

• Decision-making is quicker and more effective because of Flow's ability to automatically collect and collate information from multiple data sources. The system uses industrial data obtained from Historian, SQL Databases, online data stores, IoT, and even Excel and text files to present statistical or historical data against real-time production data for easier analytics and decision making.
• Technical staff can identify bottlenecks quickly to take corrective measures and maintain production levels.
• Technical staff can pinpoint faults with precision and access better information to identify actions required to attend to the problem.

Other advantages include

• The ability to escalate problems faster and one does not have to follow a change of supervision every time.
• The staff spends less time briefing about the history of a decision; in turn, bottlenecks are identified and fixed quickly.
• Flow's visual reports have brought about a total culture change in the operational environment, which has led to a more focused communication, commitment to targets, and more dedicated ownership of responsibilities in the various sections.
• While previous production figures were released each morning, with Flow, much more can be done, such as the real-time display of trends and indicators of general plant health.
• Operational actions are also in the open, which helps to make things more transparent and creates greater operational alertness.