Botswana Ash (Pty) Ltd started operations in September 1995, after purchasing the liquidated assets of Soda Ash, Botswana. The Botswana government, Anglo American, De Beers and AECI are its major current shareholders. Botswana Ash is 150km west of Francistown, in Sua Pan. Botswana Ash is the major producer of natural soda ash and salt in Botswana. Soda ash is used in the manufacturing of glass, vanadium and soap powders.
There are approximately 550 employees of which 210 are involved in the maintenance activities of the mine.
Sua Pan is very isolated, therefore all technical and software support is provided from Gaborone and Gauteng.
The challenge
The previous computerised maintenance management system (CMMS) was difficult to support and there was no integration to the business system.
The link to the stores and financial system was very important for history purposes and stock control.
Inaccurate history was being stored due to the insufficient feedback, which negatively influenced the maintenance function, spares allocation and budget planning.
The inadequate CMMS led to a general lack of maintenance discipline and a breakdown in the work planning and control procedures, depicted by the key performance indicators below:
* 20 000 maintenance work orders were older than 30 days;
* Only 10% of labour time was captured on work orders; and
* Only 25% of the maintenance cost was captured on work orders.
The solution
Botswana Ash put out a tender for a business system with maintenance functionality. According to Brian Legemaate, Botswana Ash Project Manager, the whole ERP market was reviewed to identify the best fit in terms of technical functionality, implementation capability and budget. All the big ERP and CMMS players participated in the tender process and the tender was awarded to the PRAGMA Africa and Intelliware Business Solutions partnership.
PRAGMA is the provider of the maintenance software ON KEY Maintainer and Intelliware is a Syspro dealer who implements and supports IMPACT Encore.
An interface between ON KEY Maintainer and IMPACT Encore was developed by PRAGMA according to user specifications. ON KEY Maintainer interfaces with the Inventory, Work in Progress and Purchase Order modules of IMPACT Encore. Both systems operate on MS SQL databases, thereby ensuring data integrity and online integration.
PRAGMA also provided Botswana Ash with an interface between ON KEY Maintainer and MS Project for shut planning purposes.
Web-based request pages were also developed for the Operations personnel to log maintenance requests from their local workstations.
The benefits
The interface between ON KEY Maintainer and IMPACT Encore enables Botswana Ash to keep a history of the spares used in the maintenance process as well as to allow the placing of purchase requisitions from within ON KEY Maintainer. All the purchase requisitions are then converted into purchase orders in IMPACT Encore through the normal approval cycles. All stock requests are logged from within ON KEY Maintainer and stock issued from within IMPACT Encore.
The MS Project interface with ON KEY Maintainer allows the users to export maintenance work orders to MS Project to plan shutdown maintenance projects. The major benefit to Botswana Ash is the ability to log all maintenance shut work (typically 400 work orders) in one system and not to manually retype all the work orders into the project planning system.
The maintenance discipline and work planning and control procedures were improved through a series of facilitated workshops that focused on Asset Management practices.
The number of work orders created per month has dropped from 3 000 to 1 500. The improved plant availability has led to an increase in the main process plant throughput of 185 000 tons to 262 000 tons. (This is due to a number of improvement efforts including ON KEY Maintainer.)
Other benefits include:
* Only 1 400 maintenance work orders outstanding, of which 400 are older than 30 days. This is an improvement of 95%;
* The labour time captured on work orders improved to 75% from the previous 10%; and
* The maintenance cost captured on work orders improved to 90% from the previous 25%.
Alan Tait, PRAGMA Africa Director, has the following closing comments regarding the project: "The implementation and use of the maintenance system at Botswana Ash is in accordance to sound Asset Management practices as put in place by PRAGMA. This has led to the system becoming an integral part of the business processes and not just another optional maintenance tool. This project is also an indication of PRAGMA`s ability to compete in the international market and supports our vision of being the leaders in Asset Management Solutions."
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