Case Study

Taseko – Gibraltar Mine

Learn how Taseko’s Gibraltar Mine saved time and money by integrating their process and lab data and eliminating manual data entry.

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Taseko’s Gibraltar Mine Story

Taseko Gibraltar Mines, a copper-molybdenum mine, is located in south-central British Columbia and is the second largest open-pit copper mine in Canada and the fourth largest in North America. On-site processing of mined resources includes grinding and flotation separation. Taseko Gibraltar Mines previously used a DeltaV DCS system to manage their plant operations. Several data management challenges led to the desire for a better way to manage and process data during daily operations.

“We have been using PARCview for 16 months now and I am pleased. Updates are frequent, accurate, and relevant. PARCview is crucial to our data analysis.”

Alexander Day, Metallurgist, Gibraltar Mines

Process Control

$160,000 saved by integrating & visualizing data for accurate process control

Digitized Reporting

1,000 hrs/yr saved by digitizing manually recorded process and lab data

Automated Shift Reports

200 hrs/yr saved by digitizing and automating shift reporting.

Gibraltar Mine’s Challenges

The mine’s operations require reviewing and analyzing large amounts of data to ensure sound decision making and troubleshooting. Data, including both process and lab data, previously had to be entered into a spreadsheet by hand, making data entry and analysis time consuming and tedious. Without automated data entry and data automation, decisions took longer and information could not be easily transmitted and shared.

The dataPARC Solution

Gibraltar Mines implemented dataPARC’s PARCview, Excel add-in and task scheduler to streamline data processing at Gibraltar Mines. PARCview has been adopted by all engineering and management. Results included:

Impromptu configuration of trends with faster trend loading, exceptional performance of advanced calculations, and user-friendly interface.
Automated reports – process data populates and generates reports that are sent out automatically over e-mail.
Manual data entry (MDE) displays have replaced manual log entries for ease of storing and sharing data with other operators and in production meetings.
Ease of extracting data in from multiple sources, comparing process variables to make more accurate connections.
Time savings through automated data input.
A feedforward control algorithm was developed using dataPARC’s Excel add-in with development and testing only taking a day or two; an effort that would have taken a week or more using previous tools.