Copper Production Planning
Case Study
The Customer
A major copper producer in North America focused on high purity copper products. With an integrated value chain from mine to concentrator, smelter and refinery, they provide a highly sought after commodity used in electronics and other high-end industries.
Business Function
Operational Planning
BSC Function
Enablement Services – Operational Planning
Product
Qerent for Adaptive Planning
Project Timeline
Sixteen Weeks
The Problem
The copper producer had its smelter as the critical bottleneck. The challenge faced was that the throughput rate of the smelter is predominantly driven by the copper to Sulphur ratio of the feed, which changed depending on the mining schedule. Purchasing external concentrate favored the copper to Sulphur ratio (increasing throughput), however such ore is more costly than ore sourced internally.
The challenge was to find the ideal feed mix given the non-linear complexity of the plant and create an end-to-end operational plan for the value chain to set realistic operational targets.
The Solution
BSC assisted in the development of a value stream model, an optimization algorithm and a cloud deployment that takes a daily view of the operation, including concentrate supply from various sources, and determine the optimal configuration for mills and smelter.
Trading off grind quality versus speed as well as the cost of purchased concentrate versus the quality of feed to the smelter, the algorithm determined a plan that would maximise profit.
The solution includes Monte Carlo Analysis to evaluate the confidence of achieving a plan based on operational variability and risk.
The Value
Test runs of the algorithm indicated that up to $70m in incremental annual operating profit can be realised by suitable configuration of the processing chain. The model is now in use on a regular basis for daily / weekly / monthly production planning purposes.
Operations will always be complex. Managing it doesn't have to be.
Business Science Corporation
Demo Agenda
- See your constraint identified
- Run a what-if plan
- Assign actions + track KPI impact