RungePincockMinarco (RPM) recently released its new Oil Sands Solution (OSS), following last year’s introduction of several other commodity-specific scheduling solutions for surface-mined metals and both open-cut and underground coal.
“In the past, scheduling solutions have relied on inputs from a number of different data sources. OSS manages scheduling in one place from start to finish. It is now very easy to use the latest geological and haulage information to ensure schedules are accurate and achievable,” said Alun Philips, product manager for scheduling at RPM.
Craig Halliday, RPM’s vice president of software, described OSS as an end-to-end scheduling solution that is purpose builtfor oil sands mines and designed to streamline the entire mine scheduling process from geology to scheduling, haulage and product optimization.
RPM said OSS is built on the XPAC scheduling engine and is script-free, which allows schedulers to harness the underlying scheduling power to deliver results quickly.
“When schedulers can get to the job of scheduling more quickly, they can spend their time comparing and analyzing different mining options. This affords the scheduler and, consequently, the company a deeper understanding of what the mine is actually capable of,” Halliday noted.
“OSS can be implemented in days rather than weeks, and as we have found following the implementation of our other commodity-based solutions, training time is minimal. In fact, with similar RPM solutions, we have already seen a reduction of up to 80% in implementation times when compared to existing systems,” he added.
