Watpac Case Study

Our collaborative approach with clients enables us to deliver a broad range of mining and civil works tailored to each unique operating environment, encompassing a range of commodities including iron ore, gold, mineral sands and coal, as well as various local and Government agency projects. This is underpinned by a skilled workforce with expertise in long-term remote project delivery, supported by a large plant fleet, best-practice safety and management systems, and our common-sense approach to deliver excellent project outcomes.

The mining services business employs approximately 400 people nationally. Services include project management, contract open-cut mining, drilling and blasting, and mineral and processing facilities. Our civil services in Western Australia include mine access and haul roads, tailings dams, airfields, storage dams, marine works, bulk earthworks, bridge works, road works, drainage, pipework and HDPE liner installation.

What are your maintenance goals?

Maintenance goals include ensuring that the available maintenance and capital resources are managed to obtain the best possible outcome for Watpac Civil & Mining.

An effective maintenance program will ensure that the asset is maintained to achieve its full life potential by way of a preventative / predictive maintenance program that preserves and a corrective program that restores and replaces components or elements of the asset.

How do you use MEX?

The effective management of the company’s assets is dependent on the availability of relevant, reliable and timely information.

For the moment the emphasis is on stores management but increasingly MEX is used to schedule and monitor maintenance activities.

It is our goal to use MEX as a key tool in planning short term and long-term preventative maintenance, forecasting and budgeting and in the day to day management of maintenance.

The Situation

Watpac have multiple mining and civil sites that utilise MEX and rely on the portable nature of the software to efficiently conduct maintenance tasks. A number of these field sites are limited to only 3G network coverage. Our main use of MEX centres around the stores module so our stores catalogue is quite comprehensive and consists of more than 65,000 catalogue items that have custom columns. Our remote locations and intensive database meant we could struggle with speed and connectivity accessing our hosted MEX database.

The Solution

To resolve this issue we started working with MEX to optimise our database and improve our speed and efficiency. The MEX developers reviewed our system making adjustments and testing out the latest speed enhancements that was scheduled to be integrated into the next release of the software.

How did you find working with MEX to improve the performance of your hosted system?

MEX were very responsive to the performance issue. Communication was good from both the Support team and the developers and the outcomes have significantly improved performance.

How have you found your system since the improvements were implemented?

The system has much improved response times to commonly used searches but main benefit has been at our remote sites where bandwidth is at a minimum.