Johannesburg, 16 Feb 2007
BHP Billiton Mitsubishi Alliance (BMA) is Australia's largest coal producer and a leader in the international coal industry (see http://www.bmacoal.com).
BMA's nine coal mines are located in the coal-rich Bowen Basin of Central Queensland, Australia, which covers an area of 75 000km^2. The mines employ both open-cut and underground longwall operations from which coal is transported to mine preparation plants by large capacity haul trucks.
With demand for high quality coal increasing, it is critical that the utilisation of major capital assets such as BMA's coal preparation plants is as high as possible.
BMA deploys several different layers of software systems to manage the coal preparation plants - control systems like SCADA and historians, Ampla at the MES layer and SAP at the business process level.
Citect is now working with BMA to build standards-based connectivity between SAP's xMII visualisation and integration system and Ampla to provide integrated operational reporting.
Michal Postula, Ampla Technical Architect, comments: "Working with BMA on this project is an exciting opportunity to work on leading-edge software architecture for the mining industry."
"It is very important to provide operational reporting that draws on all the plant level systems," said Sascha Wenninger, IT Analyst at BMA. "Until now, there has been no good systematic way to combine information from say, Ampla and one of our low level historians."
Reports utilising this combined data will be rolled out to BMA coal preparation plants over the next year. "We will also be looking at integrating information from the SAP ERP system to provide organisation-wide context to our operational reporting," said Wenninger.
For further information, visit www.citect.com or call your regional office SOUTH AFRICA Tel: (011) 699 6600
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