Graphical works scheduler improves maintenance planning at Newcrest
“Oxygen and Prometheus have been excellent throughout the whole process. Their willingness to establish the template and support the system has been outstanding.”
Craig Thompson, Maintenance Process Specialist, Newcrest
“With the scheduler linked automatically to our HR calendars the task of producing accurate weekly schedules has become much simpler. ”
Craig Thompson, Maintenance Process Specialist, Newcrest
Challenge
Prior to implementing the solution across its four mining operations, Newcrest produced its weekly work schedules by exporting its maintenance data from its SAP system to Microsoft Project. This complicated the maintenance scheduling process as not all sites were running the same version of Project. Maintaining consistent data across two systems was time consuming and prone to error.
“It was difficult to reliably produce the weekly schedule because we had no overall control of the data and no single source of truth,” says Newcrest’s Maintenance Process Specialist, Craig Thompson.
“MS Project wasn’t synchronised with our HR calendars, so we had no automated way of knowing whether the resources we had booked to perform a work order were actually available to perform it on the scheduled date.”
Thompson says the company chose the Prometheus Group work scheduler because it integrates tightly with its core SAP management system and because it presents detailed information in a way that is easy to digest and alter.
“With Prometheus you get a graphical view of the maintenance to be executed over the week. You are presented with a Gantt chart of work orders which can be easily altered by simply dragging and dropping the task into a new timeslot.”
Before assigning a person to a task the scheduler can quickly see what their available capacity is and what it becomes after the work is assigned to them. Thompson says this assists the scheduler to distribute the workload and enables them to assign a more realistic execution date.
“With the scheduler linked automatically to HR calendars the task of producing accurate weekly schedules has become much simpler. Because the information is coming straight from SAP now, everyone views the same data and uses the schedules in the same way.”
Solution
- Implement new works scheduler that tightly integrates with SAP
- Configure Prometheus Group’s GWOS solution for implementation across all four
Newcrest sites - Provide training and ongoing support for Prometheus Group’s solution and users
Return on Investment
- Improved organisation of maintenance scheduling
- Enhanced overview of relational project mapping
- Reduced number of overlooked and/or lost work orders
Downloads
http://www.oxygenforbusiness.com/images/uploads/CS_Newcrest_Prometheus.pdf
Customer Profile
Newcrest Mining Limited
Newcrest Mining Limited is Australia’s largest gold producer and one of the world’s top 10 gold mining companies by production, reserves and market capitalisation.
Newcrest has a portfolio of low cost, long life operating mines, a strong pipeline of growth projects and highly prospective brown and greenfield exploration projects.
The company has a substantial reserve and resource base combined with a long reserve life. As at 30 June 2009, it had gold reserves of 42.8Moz and copper reserves of 4.67Mt and gold resources of 80.0Moz and copper resources
of 14.36Mt.
