As margins get leaner, mining companies are rediscovering value in plant reliability and previously ignored areas of efficiency, including consistent access to accurate data.

A survey promoted by Intergraph PP&M tracking the data access methods of process industry professionals found that more than half of respondents spent 20% or more of their time finding and validating plant information.

That equates to one entire day in a Monday-to-Friday work week.

Speaking at a recent data management system user conference in Perth, Intergraph global business development lead Brad Broughton said the study highlighted a widespread and serious problem.

“People talked about the difficulties of managing 20, 30, 40 years of information, the way it’s scattered and new people coming on board who don’t have a single point of access to the information they need,” he said.

“So they started asking around and perpetuating that sort of tribal knowledge about the way things really work.”

Intergraph senior sales executive Scott Robertson joined Broughton and MiningNewsPremium on the sidelines of the conference, outlining what’s at stake in a plant where information procedures are disorganised.

“Having the wrong information and basing your decision on the information that’s put in front of you by someone else is critical,” Robertson said.

“We have laws that put people in jail for doing that. It’s really quite important.”

In mining, the importance of running a well-oiled machine has grown with the convergence of two clear trends: companies improving economies by extending the lives of plants and regulators increasing their demands for plant information.

Robertson says that in the event of an emergency, plant operators are all too likely to search for procedures and technical data from various, possibly unreliable sources.

“If you’re looking in two or three places and hoping they’re right, you may lose your operational licence or your environmental licence,” he said.

“What would you do if there was a spill? Give me your walk-way strategy.

“If it takes you three or four days to come back with it, you’re in jeopardy.”

Intergraph’s first foray into brownfields legacy information acquisition is the SmartPlant Fusion platform, which aims to improve efficiencies through the organisation of unstructured plant information.

The company showcased the technology at conferences in Brisbane and Perth last month, citing case studies such as a Chilean copper operator which was able to achieve 90% cost savings for engineering design changes and a 250% time saving for on-site engineering design changes.

In short, SmartPlant assists in finding, capturing, organising, linking and visualising large volumes of data through a single web portal.

It uses document discovery patterns to select and extract documents into predefined folder structures, creating an index and allowing the information to be searched by name or a tag number.

Intergraph touts the program as a major time-saver that permits for more off-site collaborations and desktop applications – but Broughton emphasised the role of better plant organisation in safety.

“This part of it is so important because of the nature of these facilities,” he said.

“People relying on an outdated engineering schematic can make a very bad field decision that could have safety implications.

“So for them to think they have the latest document or information when they really don’t is actually worse than them not knowing if they have the information at all.

“Someone making a logical decision based on bad data is really more of a systematic problem.”