Developed with one of the world’s largest mining companies, Open Cut Coal Xpac Solution gives miners a standardised approach to scheduling across their operations while simplifying the process to generate reliable schedules, said RPM product manager Alun Philips.
“Open Cut Coal belongs to our family of commodity-specific solutions, based on the powerful scheduling engine of our flagship XPAC product,” he said.
“This family of products introduces a simplified, user-friendly approach to mine planning reducing the complexity of generating production schedules.”
Early adopters have already seen a large reduction in implementation and user training time due to this approach, he said.
“The first thing users notice is just how incredibly easy it is to use. Users have a very small learning curve as the interface guides you through the scheduling process, with in-depth assistance embedded into the application,” Philips said.
“One the biggest hurdles with other applications in the past has been the need to develop and maintain complex scripts to generate a workable schedule. In our XPAC Solutions, we removed the need for engineers to become script writers and debuggers, allowing them to spend significantly more time planning their mine than managing their data.
“Users shouldn’t see the simplified interface as a reduction of the overall power in the RPM scheduling offering. At the core of Open Cut Coal is the powerful XPAC scheduling engine featuring RPM’s 40 years of mining intelligence, in-built.
“It’s this mining intelligence that enables users to generate accurate and robust schedules.”
Mining operations can now easily forecast production with a modern, auditable and reliable software solution, Philips said.
“It’s fast to learn and can be implemented quickly so operations can quickly get up and running without the time and expense associated with intensive software training or model building,” he said.
Open Cut Coal is RPM’s second commodity-specific solution, following on from Underground Coal XPAC Solution which launched earlier this year.
