According to the company, Plan Manager delivers a new method for managing planning data across the mine planning horizons, from life of mine to execution planning and every stage in between. It delivers excellent accuracy, auditability and a defined and repeatable process for merging planning data.
Plan Manager enables enterprise users to view, analyse and approve mine plans across different planning horizons (life-of-mine, long-term, medium-term, short-term and ultra-short-term) and then publish an integrated plan in a variety of formats (including ISA-95 B2MML) up to the enterprise level. The consolidated mine plan can then be consumed by enterprise financial systems, process control and fleet management systems and then analysed through the corporate business intelligence systems.
Richard Mathews, CEO and managing director of RPM, commented: “Managing the interactions between planning horizons has traditionally been a significant challenge for the industry. A wide range of planning applications are used by different planning departments, often operating in silos. This has meant that the gap between a life-of-mine plan and the weekly schedule has been wider than desired. The introduction of Plan Manager finally bridges this gap.
“The RPM product management team has spent considerable time with mine planners in one of RPM’s key tier one mining clients during 2015 unravelling the complexities of this issue across many different mining operations and planning horizons, culminating in RPM releasing its Plan Manager product.”
Plan Manager supports a level of detail that is appropriate to each planning horizon, with the ability to update sections of the plan without touching data that has not changed. This means that the re-planning process is faster and more efficient. Plan Manager can also pull in task status information, stockpile balances, grades and external plan inputs such as rail schedules and make them available to different mine scheduling applications.
The full plan history functionality within Plan Manager provides users with a complete audit trail for submitted and approved plans. It allows all plans that have been submitted to be checked to ensure their validity. These checks and balances deliver greater visibility and control around the entire plan consolidation process, which also comes with security built into the workflow so that the plan approval process and automated publishing is delivered with confidence.
Mathews concluded: “RPM has long experienced the frustrations of working across different planning horizons. We expect the launch of Plan Manager to be embraced and appreciated as much by our own teams as it will be by the industry.”
