What’s New ONE STEP AHEAD

This summer, the Kidd Creek mine in Timmins, Ont., will take another step closer to complete integration of their management information systems. Maintenance planning and control functions, purchasing, inventory and accounts payable will be automated using software developed by BBJ International of San Jose, California and Melbourne, Australia. BBJ came out on top of a list of 36 software vendors during an eight- month selection process to win the Kidd Creek contract. Three other vendors also made detailed presentations to the Kidd Creek selection committee. Companies such as Mincom, bha, ShawWare and G.K. Fleming & Associates offer the same type of software to the industry. The BBJ contract, in part, will provide software to manage some 85,000 individual parts, which are kept in inventory at the Kidd Creek mine and metallurgical site. Those parts are worth about $37 million.

The software, based on BBJ’s years of experience in mine management automation, has recently been updated using their own advanced software development environment, called TODAY. An older version of BBJ’s system is being used by Brunswick Mining & Smelting in Bathurst, N.B., and by Luscar Ltd. and Syncrude in Alberta. But Kidd Creek was willing to wait a couple of months for the up-dated version.

“TODAY makes the whole task of tailoring software to site operations faster and less costly for our clients,” says Art Hill, BBJ’s Chief Operating Officer in North America.

Launched in March, 1985, after more than 20 person-years of development work, TODAY has more than 2,000 licenced users worldwide. A fifth- generation release of the product, known as TODAY-ES (Expert System) incorporates functions that imitate certain human reasoning processes. The first application, according to Hill, was at the Department of Industry, Technology and Resources in the State of Victoria, Australia. There it is used in the Victorian Business Assistance Referral System to help their staff direct entrepreneurs and small business owners to appropriate markets, agencies, and sources of capital. “We will evaluate the expert system package as time goes on and may consider purchasing it in the future,” says Richard Fennell, one of the project leaders responsible for choosing and implementing the systems at Kidd Creek. “One of the forces driving the decision to change systems for maintenance and materials management at Kidd Creek was the need to update the comany’s aging hardware,” Fennell explains. The new systems will be implemented on a more compact VAX 8550 from Digital Equipment of Canada in Burlington, Ont.

The systems being implemented at Kidd Creek are the latest in a long list of developments by the Australian- based BBJ. It has evolved from a small group of programmers writing custom code in 1975 to a multi-national public corporation with offices and agents in North and South America, Europe and Asia, as well as in its home continent. The company’s North American subsidiary is in the process of developing a network of regional branch offices in Canada and the U.S. to lend strong support to its clients. One such office is planned for Toronto.

The systems in the implementation stage at Kidd Creek can be described in two main categories: maintenance and materials management. Maintenance management includes planning and scheduling of predictive and preventative maintenance, “our most important cost control activities,” according to Ernie Hamilton, Kidd’s manager of maintenance and engineering for metallurgical operations.

A complete bill of materials and standard work specifications are designed to cut down work order preparation time. Site and shop users will have accurate information to plan material status and resource requirements, probably as early as late August. Provisions are made for breakdowns, inspections, plant shutdowns, and opportunity maintenance. Both dollars and statistics (machine and labor hours, cost per ton or per mile, etc.,) flow from other sub-systems. Fully integrated cost information is available to determine where improvements can be made.

Materials management includes parts catalogue, inventory, and purchasing. The catalogue provides access to stock by using international standards for classification and numbering by multiple manufacturers, parts numbers, descriptions, and cross-references. Inventory management is fully featured, including real-time transactions, controlled stock reservations, multi-company structures and so on. Purchasing is linked directly with inventory and accounts payable to complete the handling of complex purchase orders for request to payment.

“The BBJ systems will meet our needs most closely,” says Phil Donaldson, who manages Kidd Creek’s materials and information systems. “Their strength lies not just in the features of the integrated modules, but also in tremendous flexibility to meet our future needs with the TODAY fourth generation language. This will give our users instant access to the information they need to get their jobs done effectively.”

The system will, for example, only schedule work orders on jobs for which parts are available in the warehouse. Previously, these two functions were handled seperately by two different systems and the job scheduling had to be done manually.

BBJ personnel are assisting in the installation at Kidd Creek. “The team at Kidd Creek is certainly one of the best I’ve worked with,” says Kevin Ramsey, BBJ’s maintenance systems specialist. “They’re serious about the success of the project. As a result, we know we can help them meet the goals they’ve set for the systems.” Maintenance personnel from Brunswick Mining & Smelting even flew in to Timmins from Bathurst, N.B., to meet Ramsey during the implementation process — a gesture which indicates the respect BBJ has earned in the industry. The company is planning to publish an operators manual and to make a video-taped recording of instruction sessions to streamline the implementation process. — 30 —