Early success in South America, coupled with widespread demonstration of the cost benefits delivered by its unique MillMapper surveying technology in Australia, have put Scanalyse on a path to significant export growth over the next few years, according to the company’s chief executive Peter Clarke.
The confident prediction, in the face of expected tougher times for the global mining industry due to lower commodity prices, is based on the quality – and ostensibly the positive implications – of data generated over the past two years since MillMapper was launched in Australia.
“We’ve been extremely fortunate with our timing ... because we’ve been able to get the technology out there into the industry when people have felt comfortable about spending some money and seeing whether this technology is going to do something for them or not,” Clarke said.
“We have got it to a point where we can demonstrate how the technology is helping to reduce operating costs, increase production revenue, and also improve mill inspection safety, because of the experience we’ve had over the past 12-18 months and the data that has been generated.
“That can now be analysed and show the cost cutting aspect, which is increasingly important because that’s the pressure that’s going on now.”
Positioned in the market now as world leading grinding mill condition monitoring technology, MillMapper was originally developed at Western Australia’s Curtin University in Perth with the support of mining industry partners Alcoa, Kalgoorlie Consolidated Gold Mines and BHP Billiton.
MillMapper uses calibrated laser scanner data captured inside a mill within minutes to determine thickness at several million points on all liner surfaces with millimetre accuracy. Patent-protected proprietary software provide operators with a high-density 3D colour-coded thickness map of the mill (shell, feed and discharge ends), allowing them to rapidly and accurately determine liner condition for the entire visible liner surface.
Conventional mill measurement methods such as ultrasonic gauges only provide a few arbitrarily selected measurements, are prone to human error and require an operator to enter the potentially hazardous environment of the mill.
Clarke said Scanalyse had already captured an estimated 30% of the Australian market and was now making a concerted effort to break into the South American market.
“Entry into Chile and Peru has been achieved, starting in January 2008, and several major sites are now using the technology,” he said.
“As a result of an Austmine hosted tour to Brazil in April and a recent visit to follow up leads Scanalyse has now commenced operations in Brazil on two mine sites with several others expected to follow suit over the next few months.
“We looked at Chile first because of the large amount of copper mining and processing, which requires grinding mills and generally large grinding mills. The industry there has been developed over the last 20 years rather than the last 50-60 years, which means there are quite a few of the more modern plants designed with the large SAG or AG mill, followed by a couple of ball mills.
“That type of processing, and that type of circuit and equipment, is very appropriate for our technology. Essentially it’s a critical path processing line and if any of those components gets shut down then the whole mine site stops producing, and so it’s in those sort of mission critical elements where you need to maintain your equipment at a much higher level because you don’t have any redundancy.”
Clarke said the US, Canada and parts of Africa also represented important future markets.
“At the moment exports would only be about 10% of our total revenues,” he said.
“But we would expect that over the next couple of years we would grow that quite dramatically, and in 3-4 years time probably 75% of our income should come from overseas.”
Scanalyse has doubled its workforce in the past 12 months and is preparing for a further round of recruitment.
“It [recruitment] has been a constraint on growth,” Clarke said. “It’s been very difficult to find experienced and high quality personnel who’ve really got the ability to help us take this technology to the international marketplace.
“That could be the silver lining for us in the storm clouds that are brewing. There are sites closing down and there are people who are now looking for work. So I think we stand a better chance of finding people that we need.”