Wenco Signs Largest Ever Contract
[October 2010] - In what is officially the largest deal in company history, Wenco International Mining Systems Limited has secured a contract for the supply and installation of Wenco’s Fleet Management System (FMS) to four of Coal India Limited’s (CIL) mines.
Sonepur Bazari, Gevra, Kusmunda, and Dipka will receive implementation of Wenco’s FMS to monitor and control a total of 40 shovels and 224 trucks.
Sonepur Bazari is part of CIL’s subsidiary, Eastern Coalfields Limited (ECL). ECL has 17 opencast mines in total. The Sonepur Bazari project has a projected mine life of 46 years.
Gevra, Kusmunda, and Dipka are part of CIL’s subsidiary South Eastern Coalfields Limited (SECL). SECL is the largest coal producing company in India, with a total of 21 opencast mines.
Wenco’s Fleet Management System will monitor the position of mobile mining equipment at each of the mines, optimizing the use and performance of the equipment. Of note the system shall organize the dispatch of the dump trucks between the shovels, excavators and dumping points of the mine, improving the availability and utilization of the heavy equipment mining machinery.
In addition, the system will utilize its fuel and lube management feature to monitor and record fleet consumption by recording data dispensed from fuel stations and mobile fuel service vehicles.
Fleet health data will also be captured using onboard interfaces to Wenco’s rugged Octagon computer installed on the equipment. The Octagon will facilitate the polling and capturing of signals from vital signs monitoring systems. Wenco’s suite of machine health applications, Onboard Insight, Eventing System, and Maintenance Monitor help prevent equipment failures and cost over-runs with polling and alarm-notifications from onboard OEM sensors and system data.
“The contract explicitly stated that the successful supplier would provide an industry standard ODBC compliant technology,” says Garth Connal, VP Sales for Wenco, “Wenco’s open architecture philosophy will enable CIL the integration of Wenco’s system with their ERP system for data import and export related to production, equipment performance and manpower attendance.”
Ferrexpo Poltava Mining to install Wenco Fleet Management Systems
[September 2010] - Looking to achieve a 10% improvement in productivity, Poltava has chosen Wenco International Mining Systems Ltd. to install their Fleet Management System for use with 135 trucks and shovels, 16 High Precision Drills, and 54 Auxiliary units.
The 54 pieces of Auxiliary Equipment will be monitored using Wenco's AES (Auxiliary Equipment System) designed for water trucks, graders, bulldozers or any other equipment involved in ground preparation, construction or maintenance. The system records operational statuses and data from the machine without any input required from the operator. The statuses are derived from digital inputs, speed, direction of travel and equipment location.
Real-time views of equipment show position and status. Historical data is used in reporting machine usage, cycles and other operational statistics. Productivity information, such as water use and ground coverage and material movement, is calculated with the use of machine specific parameters.
The Wenco system was purchased as an operational tool to help to run the mine in a more efficient, cost effective manner. Of note, Poltava is particularly interested in automatic truck dispatching and ore grade control.
Ore Quality Control provides Poltava with the ability to specify ore quality targets to be delivered at a certain location. Multiple locations are supported and each can have different requirements. So each shovel, in their unique location and material, are used in the calculation to determine how trucks are dispatched in order to achieve the best material grade range delivered to any particular location.
Owned by Swiss company Ferrexpo, Poltava is an iron ore mine located in Ukraine approximately 300 kilometres south of Kiev near the Dnieper River. Poltava has an estimated resource of about 18 billion tonnes of iron ore grading about 30%.
The mine operates more than 100 haul trucks, mostly Caterpillar 777D’s, 785C’s, and 789C’s and Komatsu HD 785’s and PC1200’s. They also have a small number of Belaz trucks. Recently, Poltava purchased Hitachi EH3500 trucks and Hitachi EX3600 shovels.
In order to assist in the ongoing operation of the system, Wenco will be establishing a service center in the city of Komsomolsk with the help of Euromash, the local Hitachi dealer.
Vasilkovsky Selects Wenco for Vasilkovsky Gold
[May 2010] – Vancouver, BC. Vasilkovsky has chosen to install the Wenco Fleet Management System on the entire fleet at Vasilkovksy Gold mine, the largest gold deposit in the central Asian state of Kazakhstan with proven reserves of 370 tonnes.
The system to be installed at Vasilkovsky is specifically designed to automatically assign trucks in order to achieve the best utilization of all mining equipment and maximize production.
Vasilkovsky will be receiving Wenco’s core service, high precision BenchManager for shovels, and third party high precision drill sensor monitoring for the Atlas Copco drill fleet.
Vasilkovksy Gold will be receiving BenchManager for the shovel fleet consisting of Komatsu PC 1800’s. BenchManager Shovel Positioning gives operators visual confirmation of ore quality and visual confirmation of material type, promoting ore quality control at the loading point. When integrated with Wenco’s Fleet Management System, truck assignments are automatically determined according to material type, load quality, and requirements of ore quality at the blend points.
Iosif Tabakman, Regional Manager, said that, “Vasilkovsky was impressed with the success of installation performed by Wenco at Olmypia mine, and the operation of the Mesh Network at Nurba and Olympia mine.”
MESH networking provides self-healing, reliable coverage over wide areas and deep convoluted pits. The selfhealing system has the logic to find the most reliable and shortest path of data transfer back to the host and vice versa.
About Vasilkovsky
Vasilkovsky Gold Field is one of world's largest gold fields. The operation was opened in 1963 and has reserves estimated at 370 tons. Vasilkovskoe Zoloto produces about 1000 kg of cathodic gold per year.
Teck Fording River Installs Wenco Software
[June 2010] - Teck Coal Ltd has chosen Wenco Software for operations at Fording River located 29km northeast of Elkford, BC. Coal mined at Fording River is primarily metallurgical coal, although a small amount of thermal coal is also produced. The current annual production capacity of the mine is 8.0 million tonnes of clean coal and the preparation plant is 10 million tonnes of clean coal. Proven and probable reserves at Fording River are projected to support mining for a further 41 years.
Wenco is installing software on Fording’s fleet consisting of 56 haul trucks and 13 loading units made up of 6 shovels and 7 loaders.
The system installed at Fording River was chosen for Wenco’s open system architecture, allowing Teck Coal to source their own on-board hardware and install their own Cisco broadband radio system. Wenco’s open system architecture coupled with its flexibility in design includes the ability to fully operate over any IP-based wireless network.
Mines today know it is imperative to optimize resource to remain competitive in the mining market. The Wenco system at Fording River, “was chosen to increase site productivity while lowering operational costs.” stated Glen Trainor, North America Sales and Marketing Manager.
Fording River is the fourth Teck mine to install Wenco software, with other systems in place at Highland Valley Copper,Coal Mountain and Elk Valley Coal. Wenco is committed to helping Teck reach their operational goals and strategies.
About Teck
Teck is Canada’s largest diversified mining, mineral processing and metallurgical company. Headquartered in Vancouver, Canada, we are a world leader in the production of copper, metallurgical coal and zinc, a significant producer of gold, molybdenum and specialty metals, with interests in several oil sands development assets.
Collectively with its operations throughout BC and Alberta, is the world’s second largest exporter of metallurgic coal, and exporter of 20% of the world's seaborne hard metallurgical coal for the international steel industry.