Exeplant, part of OMEGALLIANCE Group, has completed a series of projects on introducing MES systems at Krastsvetmet — leading precious metals manufacturer in Russia.
The projects were on track since 2014 and dealt with the company’s refining.
The pilot project was implemented at one of the sites in 2013–2014. The system in real time conveys the data on performed process operations, the type of used equipment, the time spent, as well as monitors compliance with the operations sequence ensuring technology compliance by the plant personnel. The last function allows to track deviations from the technical procedure and take timely correction measures, as well as prevent such situations in the future.
The second project (2014–2015) was aimed at posting material accounting within the entire refining.
The project resulted in a solution implementing the material accounting, the precious metals balance development and the control of personnel activity. The system controls the material flows between the sites per lot.
The implemented project ensures tracking the movement of lots of raw material, semi-finished products and high degree of readiness middlings between the refining sites. Through this, workshop craftsmen and supervisors always have access to up-to-date information on the material assets lots presence in workshops, both in ligature mass and in net precious metals contained in them. The calculation of the precious metals net content is made automatically through integration with the central plant laboratory software, from where the lab analyses data is imported.
A lot identification system based on bar codes was developed and implemented to automate the accounting of the moved lots. Through integration with the lot identification system and the weighing equipment, all data on middlings movements between the sites are entered into MES system automatically. This ensures data relevance and reliability.
One of the project most important results is the development of a tool to calculate the precious metals balance at the refining per sites and workshops. Thanks to automatic transfer of the data on raw materials, semi-finished and finished products available at the sites, and their precious metals content to the system, the balance is calculated using reliable data with minimized human factor.
The third project (2015–2016) covered the raw materials workshop and the finished products warehouse (safe deposit). Not only the material accounting, but the technology control as well was implemented at these sites.
Including the raw materials workshop and the warehouse into the system allowed to obtain in MES the whole material balance for entire refining.
Alongside the implementation of the MES solution at this project, the implementation of new ERP (SAP) and LIMS (LabWare) systems was carried out. They replaced the in-house system that had been functioning for several years. Thus one of the main goals was to integrate the MES solution with ERP and LIMS, and, eventually, to simultaneously commercially launch all three systems.
The coordination of three implementation teams was the main difficulty in this project and was successfully completed by the customer. The MES solution as the core of the accounting and monitoring production system seamlessly integrated with the enterprise IT landscape.
As of today (July 2017), the customer’s development team is actively developing the MES solution: adding new functions, scaling the system for jewellery production and technical article production.
