Company Overview
This Canadian mining company is headquartered in Vancouver, British Columbia, and employs more than 15,000 people worldwide. The company owns several gold mines in Canada, two mines in Mexico, and four in Central and South America. The NLINK OPC to SAP Solution was purchased and installed at one of their gold mines in Canada.
The Challenge
The customer needed a solution that could retrieve the raw operational data from its various mine assets (pumps, motors, etc.) and create SAP measurement documents. They also wanted to monitor the raw data and to automatically create SAP Work Notifications (Work Orders) when any value exceeded its pre-set threshold. Specifically, the customer had 192 OPC DA tags representing data that needed to be loaded into SAP on a periodic basis. This OPC tag data represented real-time measurement of equipment state-of-health, like motor current, temperature, speed, vibration, run hours, etc. This data needed to be posted to the SAP Plant Maintenance module via SAP Measuring Documents against existing Measurement Points on Equipment or Functional Locations.
The Solution
The delivered NLINK OPC to SAP Solution provided three distinct SAP interfaces:
SAP Interface Description
Download Asset Master from SAP, where the Functional Location, Equipment and Measurement Point structure for a given Planning Plant is retrieved from SAP to make it easy to assign OPC Tags to the Measurement Points they should post readings against.
Create SAP Measuring Documents, where measurement data (such as pump run-hours, etc.) are posted to SAP Plant Maintenance via Measurement Documents against existing Measurement Points on Equipment or Functional Locations.
Create SAP Work Notifications, SAP Work Notifications are posted to SAP Plant Maintenance against the Equipment that a particular Measurement Point belongs to.
The first phase of the project involved deploying the NLINK OPC to SAP Solution and running the Asset Mater download interface. The OPC tags representing the real-time readings were then mapped to the appropriate SAP assets and functional locations. Once done the Create SAP Measuring Documents interface was enabled and SAP measurement documents were created on a periodic basis. The final phase of the project was to enable the Create SAP Work Notification interface. The particular thresholds and parameters for each measurement type for each physical asset were setup and validated. Next the Create SAP Work Notification was enabled and tested to ensure that the appropriate threshold conditions indeed created the correct SAP Work Notification. The system was then placed in Production.
Benefits
The NLINK OPC to SAP Solution was able to provide this customer with a cost-effective, out-ofthe-box supported solution that completely automated the required interfaces between the PLCs and their SAP system. The system was deployed remotely from the US without any Junot Systems personnel required to make an on-site visit the mine. This approach greatly reduced the cost to the customer while simultaneously speeding up the time to deployment. Importantly for this customer, the solution was able to be deployed quickly, and without requiring any involvement from any other set of consultants or Systems Integrators. The customer simply made sure that the required data was being provided by the OPC server and the NLINK OPC to SAP Solution did the rest.
