The recurring question on a gold or nickel operation is why the mass balance does not close. Usually it can be explained. The difficulty is that explaining it needs assay, sampling, weightometer and plant data lined up against the same periods, and that alignment lives in one person's spreadsheet.
Our principal consultant spent 18 years on operational data projects for BHP, Rio Tinto, Senex Energy and Mackay Sugar, delivered while working with previous consulting employers. Those companies are not Solve8 clients.
Processing operations where the number that matters is a reconciliation.
Making the monthly reconciliation reproducible, so that producing the figure and explaining it are the same action rather than two separate exercises a week apart.
Results that arrive after the material has moved, which means every reconciliation involves a decision about how to align periods. Those decisions deserve to be written down somewhere the organisation owns.
Historian context so a query can ask about a mill or a circuit, with enough retained resolution to investigate an upset months after it happened.
Joining work order history to what the equipment was actually doing, which is the join most maintenance reporting is missing and the reason failure patterns stay invisible.
Not because it is wrong, but because only one person can defend it.
On most operations the monthly reconciliation is produced by a metallurgist who knows which assays to trust, how to treat a stockpile estimate, and what to do when a weightometer has drifted. The output is usually good. The process is undocumented, because the judgement is experience rather than procedure.
That arrangement holds until the person is on leave, changes roles, or is asked to justify a figure from eighteen months ago. Then the organisation discovers that it owned the number but not the method.
Making the method explicit does not mean automating the judgement away. It means writing down what the judgement is, so the next person applies the same rules and an auditor can follow them. That is a smaller piece of work than it sounds, and it is worth more than most analytics projects on the same site.
Metallurgical accounting and reconciliation, more than anything else. Gold and nickel processing lives or dies on whether the mass balance closes, and the gap between what the plant thinks it recovered and what was actually poured is where the arguments happen. Most of that gap is explainable, but explaining it needs sampling, assay, weightometer and plant data lined up against the same periods, which is exactly the work that tends not to be modelled anywhere durable.
Because it depends on inputs that arrive at different times with different confidence. Assays come back days after the material moved, weightometers drift between calibrations, and stockpile estimates are estimates. The monthly figure therefore involves judgement about how to align those, and when the judgement lives in a spreadsheet maintained by one metallurgist, the organisation has a single point of failure rather than a process. Making those decisions explicit is usually more valuable than making them more sophisticated.
No. Solve8 is Brisbane-based and works nationally. Reconciliation, historian and reporting work is done where the data is, which for most Goldfields operations means a Perth office or a cloud environment rather than the plant. Where walking the circuit genuinely helps, for example checking that a sampling point is where the model assumes it is, we travel. We would rather tell you a trip is unnecessary than bill you for one.
Yes. Historian work on a concentrator or a roaster is mostly about context: making a query able to ask about a mill or a circuit rather than about a list of tags, keeping enough resolution to investigate an upset months later, and getting reporting load off the control system. We support the PI System and other historians and resell none of them, so we have no reason to recommend replacing one that works.
Our principal consultant spent 18 years on operational data projects for BHP, Rio Tinto, Senex Energy and Mackay Sugar, delivered while working with previous consulting employers. That included mining operational data systems and production reporting. Those companies are prior project experience through those employers rather than Solve8 clients.
Scoped work starts from around $3,500 for a focused assessment, for example documenting how a monthly reconciliation is currently produced and where it depends on undocumented judgement. That is often enough to decide whether the rest is a small fix. Larger work is quoted after scoping.
If the answer is one person, that is worth addressing before it becomes urgent. Tell us how the figure is built today.