The company Ventyx, a leading supplier of enterprise software and services for asset intensive industries like the mining field, has collectively more than 120 years of experience delivering enterprise solutions. In this article, Mining Examiner shows you a list of solutions provided by the company with the precious metals industry in mind.

These types of ore are usually present in extremely low concentrations, so quality control of analytical data and flawless sampling procedures are even more important than in other forms of mining. Here is a list of nine solutions created by Ventyx to make precious minerals mining easier and more profitable.

Mine Planning

Increase the accuracy of mine planning while maximising your ability to respond efficiently to changing conditions with our extensive geological modelling and mine design functionality.

Mining companies today are under increasing pressure to boost output from their existing mines and to bring new projects online quickly. To maximize mine profitability, planners and schedulers must create mine plans that match the field as accurately as possible.

Planners and schedulers must account for a staggering array of variables — geological samples and data from the mine, the production capacity of each stage of the process, available equipment, machinery and manpower, customer demand and commodity prices, product cost assumptions and the health and safety of workers.

Ventyx Mine Planning accounts for all significant variables as quickly and accurately as possible so that customer demands are met and production is optimized from mine to market. Key benefits include:

• Integrated information flows between all mining activities
• Optimal efficiency in mine planning operations
• Streamlined engineering processes
• Improved productivity
• Lower mining costs through smarter use of technology and information management systems
• Increased profit potential

Laboratory Management

Improve quality while reducing sample turnaround times with automated analytical laboratory processes including sample registration, barcode label printing, worklist generation, on-line data capture, and transfer of results.

Ventyx provides a wide range of tools to help laboratories optimize their processes and ensure quality results. Key benefits include:

• Increasing sample analysis rates
• Reducing sample turnaround times
• Providing real-time management data
• Enabling better understanding of laboratory operations by management
• Dramatically improving quality by identifying potential problems before they are reported, enabling technicians to more rapidly investigate and address these problems

Production Accounting

Proactively manage risk and facilitate timely and accurate recognition of revenue by streamlining metal accounts data processes with our complete production accounting solution.

Ventyx Production Accounting provides a complete production accounting solution designed for mining, mineral processing, smelting, and refining operations. It addresses key production accounting challenges by providing the ability to take on production data from various sources. Key benefits include:

• Facilitates a change in business philosophy from past accounting for mass to future accounting for metal content
• Supports proactive risk management
• Enables timely and accurate recognition of revenue
• Enhances production performance measurement
• Enables improved production planning and forecasting

Logistics, Sales and Marketing

Optimize the tracking and logistics of mining products from their initial extraction, stockpiling, production, shipping and transportation to their eventual delivery to the customer while simplifying complex sales, marketing and invoicing processes.

Access real-time information on the entire logistics chain. With Ventyx, organizations can maximize commercial outcomes by charting the impact of sales and providing a current view of available and upcoming supply of saleable product.

Ventyx Logistics, Sales and Marketing solutions generate what-if scenarios for quick reaction to changing market conditions and optimizes sales position and revenues. The solution also provides comprehensive and integrated coverage of the logistics and sales processes for mining and mineral producers and traders. Key benefits include:

• Track ore, concentrate, and product inventories across the entire supply chain in bulk form and packaged form
• Automatically adjust stockpile quality
• Reduce administration costs and increase management awareness of the company’s commercial position
• Schedule transport to meet changing demands and maximize output of logistics processes
• Provide specifications for invoicing, metal balancing, stockpile blending, and deviation management

Enterprise Asset Management

Maximize the performance of your physical assets over their entire lifecycle, ensuring asset availability and reliability while reducing operational costs and risk.

Ventyx Enterprise Asset Management solutions provide a full, clear view of an organization’s asset infrastructure and the workforce maintaining it. Our capabilities extend beyond traditional production assets. With Ventyx, you can manage multiple asset types and still have one clear view of the entire asset infrastructure. Key benefits include:

• Improving asset and resource utilization
• Improving equipment readiness
• Increasing safety and mitigated risk
• Reducing asset lifecycle costs
• Ensuring supply chain availability and visibility

Mobile Work Management — Asset Service

Improve workforce safety and productivity by delivering critical information to the technicians when they need it to make better informed decisions. Improve governance and reporting by capturing data at the point-of-performance, eliminating time-consuming paperwork and double data entry.

Asset intensive organizations service and operate their assets in the field, where they live. This workforce is often distributed across vast distances, or in remote and dangerous locations, and exposed to volatile conditions.

Ventyx solutions provide unique mobile business applications that take asset management and business processes to the work site to automate processes and to safely and efficiently perform inspections, maintenance and repairs.

• Improving quality, consistency and efficiency of asset-based work
• Reducing workforce fatigue and improving workforce safety
• Increasing asset productivity and asset availability
• Facilitating compliance with asset strategies established and managed in EAM systems
• Reducing cost of asset maintenance and workforce deployment
• Providing governance over work processes in the field
• Improving visibility of assets and workforce
• Standardizing or policies and processes in the field and across the organization

 Parts Management

Identify the optimal holdings of every stock item by analyzing its usage patterns and criticality with our intelligent, predictive software solutions. Or use our intuitive, graphical parts catalog to help you always find the right part, right away.

Understanding parts management and inventory optimization plays an important role in an organization’s success — particularly in relation to mission-critical assets. The challenge is how to best balance inventory levels. Ventyx Parts Management is the most effective way to reduce inventory while protecting against the risk of stock-outs. Key benefits include:

• Reducing asset down-time by increasing maintenance team efficiency
• Reducing working capital tied up in inventory
• Improving the effective management of stock
• Enabling all parts and service information to be found quickly and easily
• Providing accurate catalog descriptions and classifications

Asset-Intensive Enterprise Resource Planning

Asset intensive industries managing skilled workforces in remote and dangerous locations and capital-intensive commercial operations require specialist Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions focused on the unique challenges faced by asset intensive industries.

Photo: National Archives and Records Administration

Asset intensive industries tend to focus more on the complex plants and equipment they use than the products they produce. Any interruption due to plant or equipment failure can result in lost production that may be unrecoverable.

The enterprise asset management components of the ERP software are as important as material requirement planning components for a manufacturing organization. Asset-intensive ERP has been specifically designed to maximize asset productivity and help prevent equipment failure that can lead to lost revenue and safety and environmental risks. Key benefits include:

• Improving management of human resources and skilled labor
• More rigorous control of data collection for financial and managerial reporting
• More effective corporate governance and better transparency
• A more efficient supply chain that frees up capital tied up in inventory
• Improving availability of assets and reduced stock-outs of critical items

 Business Intelligence & Analytics

Make better decisions by capturing and aggregating the rich data held within software systems across your enterprise with pre-packaged analytical tools built on the KPIs which matter most.

To improve strategic and tactical decision making, management need greater insight and visibility of all aspects of the operation — from the effectiveness of its staff to the performance of its plants and equipment. Ventyx Business Intelligence captures and aggregates rich data held across disparate software systems.

Easily tailored for individual users or user groups, Ventyx Business Intelligence compiles the industry’s best business practices into pre-packaged solutions to enable companies to more effectively monitor and manage their distributed assets on a real time, near-real time, and event-driven basis. Key benefits include:

• Prepackaged dashboards for high value KPIs such as asset health, work management, operations management, smart grid, and financials
• More timely and accurate reporting on the KPIs which matter most — working alongside your existing corporate BI strategy
• Improving decision making by capturing and aggregating the rich data held within software systems across the enterprise
• Better allocation of finite funding to generate the greatest return on investment
• Make costs and opportunities more accurate and visible throughout the organization, from line managers to executives
• Improving productivity and asset reliability by establishing baselines and best practices