RPM enhances mining experience

The latest release of HAULET from RungePincockMinarco (RPM) makes it easier for miners to significantly reduce costs related to haulage. Additionally, the release of RPM’s XERAS 8.1 helps to improve mining conditions by focusing on user experience.

HAULNET

The latest release of HAULNET delivers engineers an intelligent tool that can help to reduce haulage costs in mining operations. In the past, one of the largest problems facing engineers in delivering real cost savings, has been the effort required to create accurate and usable haulage models.

The lack of a dedicated software application for haulage has required a high level of manual intervention to create fully connected networks. Consequently, analysts have struggled to complete accurate in depth analysis of haulage cost. RPM developed HAULNET to create this connected network and to perform the necessary analysis.

The latest release of HAULNET has made the haulage network creation process even easier. The new user interface enables users to quickly and easily build haul networks from scratch. The new process steps include:

• Using the mouse to point and click out the haulage routes across the mine site.
• Letting the application snap the route to the underlying surface and extend it to join existing roadways, nodes and points of interest.
• It also interprets and rationalises the haulage network.
• Finally, it can autocorrect creation mistakes and smooth out routes, removing unnecessary detail that is not required to perform an accurate analysis.

This latest release now sees HAULNET take advantage of 64-bit operating systems allowing for even faster analysis of complex haulage networks.

Chief technology officer, Paul Beesley, commented: “One of our clients has a haulage network of over 8500 km. To put that in perspective, that is the same distance from London to Las Vegas. This makes for a very large and complex network. HAULNET has always been able to handle such large datasets, however with the upgrade to the underlying architecture, this analysis can now be performed significantly faster, giving users more time to spend reviewing options and making the right decisions”.

The latest HAULNET system has also added support for the Russian language.

XERAS 8.1

RPM has made another product improvement with the third upgrade to the company’s financial modelling software, XERAS.

“This year has seen a complete upgrade of the user interface and a move to enterprise integration for XERAS,” commented Beesley.

XERAS 8.1 is focused on system performance improvements and boasts a dramatic improvement in calculation speeds of up to 50% and a significant improvement in spread sheet loading times, allowing very large models to be opened quickly.

“This improvement means users spend less time waiting for the answer and more time using the information to make informed decisions,” added Beesley.

Other enhancements to XERAS include continual improvement to the popular Navigator feature. The Navigator pane in XERAS allows a workflow to be defined and guides the user through a standard process within their model.

“Rich text, diagrams, images and pictures now appear in a detachable window, thereby providing improved support to users while facilitating standard process which can be set by the business in the development of their budgets. Additional tasks can now be linked to navigator steps such as executing report queries.”

XERAS has always had strong audit and validation capabilities. With XERAS 8.1, users get even more visibility behind the numbers with a dynamic drill down tree that displays precedent cell references and values at a glance.

“Again, this is about spending less time looking for the underlying data and performing the validation. Users can quickly and easily see the information they need and use it to make the right business decisions.”

XERAS 8.1 is now also fully translated into Spanish, making the product more desirable for Spanish speaking customers, particularly those in Latin America.

Adapted from press releases by Katie Woodward

Read the article online at: https://www.worldcoal.com/mining/12122013/rpm_enhances_mining_experience_346/