Most consultancies that list Mackay are selling websites and chatbots. The problems here are different: Ampla configurations nobody owns any more, delay accounting that stopped reconciling, and four systems reporting four different tonnages for the same shift.
We are Brisbane-based and work across Queensland. 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.
Mackay is a mining services and sugar town with a coal export port attached. The data problems follow from that.
Delay accounting and reason code trees that have drifted from how the plant runs. Production reporting that gets corrected by hand before anyone will present it. Historian coverage that stops at the boundary of whoever installed it.
Crush season is short and unforgiving, so a reporting problem in June is a different thing from a reporting problem in October. Ampla and historian work here has to survive a season without anyone being available to nurse it.
Workshops and service businesses running jobs across multiple mine sites, with quoting, scheduling and invoicing in systems that do not talk to each other. Often the fastest return on this list, because the process is already well understood.
Where mine production data has to line up with what the terminal recorded. The disagreement is usually about when a tonne was counted rather than about how many there were, which makes it a definition problem before it is a systems problem.
The single most common reason a Central Queensland site calls us.
Ampla was installed across a lot of Australian mining and processing operations, and in many cases the people who configured it have since moved on. What is left is a working system nobody feels confident changing. Reason codes accumulate, the tree stops matching how the plant runs, and operators pick the nearest available option because the correct one is not there.
The symptom that brings people to us is a shift report showing downtime against a cause nobody believes. The number then gets adjusted in a spreadsheet before it goes anywhere, and once that happens the system has become an input to a manual process rather than the record it was bought to be.
Most of the fix is analysis rather than software. What are operators actually selecting, which codes have not been used in two years, where does one cause hide three different failures, and which of these distinctions does anyone downstream actually act on. That work can be done without touching production, and it usually shortens the list of changes needed rather than lengthening it.
Getting weighbridge, SCADA, historian, production system and ERP to agree, or at least to explain themselves.
PI System and other historians: asset modelling, templates, retention, and getting reporting off the control system.
Power BI over plant data, with the calculation agreed once so two reports stop disagreeing about the same month.
Using historian records for rationalisation, rather than starting a review from scratch.
Ongoing maintenance and improvement of systems you already depend on, including ones whose original vendor has moved on.
Making systems exchange data without a person retyping it, which is where most of the time goes.
Yes, and it is the reason this page exists. Ampla sits behind delay accounting and production reporting on a lot of Central Queensland sites, and support for it has thinned out as the people who originally configured it have moved on. We pick up reason code trees that no longer match how the plant runs, downtime that does not reconcile with the historian, and reports that stopped being trusted. Our principal consultant worked on Ampla at Mackay Sugar, gained while working with a previous consulting employer.
No. Solve8 is Brisbane-based and works across Queensland. Most historian, Ampla and reporting work needs no site visit, because the systems are reachable and the problem is usually in configuration or in how data is modelled rather than in the hardware. Where a site visit genuinely helps, for example walking a plant to check that reason codes match what operators actually do, we travel. We would rather tell you a trip is unnecessary than bill you for one.
Almost always because the plant changed and the configuration did not. Reason codes get added over years without anyone retiring the ones that no longer apply, so operators pick the closest option rather than the correct one. Then a shift report shows an hour of downtime against a cause nobody believes, the number gets corrected by hand in a spreadsheet, and within a few months the system is treated as an input to a manual process rather than as the record. Fixing this is mostly analysis of what operators are actually selecting and why, not software work.
The Resources Safety and Health Legislation Amendment Act 2024 brought in Resources Safety and Health Queensland provisions from 1 September 2024 that put more weight on demonstrable systems rather than on paperwork produced after an event. In practice that raises the value of records you can query: what an alarm did, when a guard was bypassed, how long a condition persisted. Sites that already historise properly find they can answer those questions. Sites that cannot usually discover it at the worst possible moment.
That is one of the most common requests we get from Central Queensland sites. Weighbridge, SCADA, the historian, the production system and the ERP each hold a version of the same tonnage, and the four numbers disagree by amounts nobody can explain. The work is to establish where each figure comes from, at what point in the process it is captured, and which one is the record for which purpose. It is usually less about integration than about agreeing definitions, and it is cheaper than it sounds.
Scoped work starts from around $3,500 for a focused assessment, for example a review of a delay accounting configuration with recommendations you can action yourself. Larger integration and reporting programs are quoted after scoping, because the price depends on how many systems are involved and how much of the current configuration is documented. We will tell you at the scoping stage if the problem is smaller than you thought.
A shift report, a tonnage that does not reconcile, a reason code tree that has not been touched in five years. If we think you can fix it without us, we will say so.