Case study - OCP | Atracio - The Next-Gen ERP

RFID-based inventory for minining machinery

Mining

As the biggest phosphates mining company in the world, OCP Group needs to ensure the most efficient process to maintain and account for every asset in order to reach operational excellence.

Our solution aimed at leveraging the unique advatanges of RFID technology to design a very fast, safe accurate process to carry out inventories without having to interrupt the production process.

CHALLENGE

As the biggest phosphate mining company in the world, OCP needs to manage, maintain and account for a large and diverse number of machinery.

The identification of the industrial assets at the world’s largest phosphate washing plant was a manual process where the operator had to momentarily stop the conveyers (for safety purposes) get within a reading range to the machines (often time using a ladder), locate the engraved asset ID (often times hidden by phosphate dust) before taking note of the machine identification on a paper report. This process was not only labour intensive and time consuming but was had a negative impact of the production flow.

SOLUTION

Our team integrated Atracio’s RFID based asset management module, which uses handheld readers to do an exhaustive inventory of all industrial assets at a distance (up to 30 feet) without having to interrupt production.

A search feature ‘Eureka’ was developed to help the maintenance team to locate a misplaced machinery using an RF sonar.

The mobile application loaded on the mobile RFID readers allows to carry annual and periodic inventories as well as random spot checks. All information is then synchronized wirelessly with the server application which can be accessed through a web browser.