OWL EYE® in mineral processing — what a plant manager says after 12 monthsOWL EYE® in mineral processing — what a plant manager says after 12 monthsOWL EYE® in mineral processing — what a plant manager says after 12 months

"The biggest change is not the accuracy. It is that the argument stopped."

That is how the plant manager of a north-German mineral-processing site summarises what has changed in the twelve months since commissioning an OWL EYE® STOCKPILE installation. The site processes industrial minerals in a classic mix of crushing, classification and drying. Four piles — feed, intermediate, fine product, coarse product — have been measured continuously since August 2022.

Before the installation: weekly manual surveys with a total station, monthly reconciliation against the ERP book stock, constant friction between dispatch and operations about what was actually on the yard. An inventory gap of 3–5 % was normal. At a few thousand tonnes per finished pile, that gap translates into a six-digit valuation corridor.

Today: all four piles are scanned every ten minutes. The plant manager sees the current tonnage on a dashboard in his office, dispatch pulls the same figure directly through the OPC UA interface. The inventory gap at the last auditor visit came in at 0.7 % — inside the system's specified ±1 %.

What was not on the datasheet. Three observations from twelve months of running:

• Weather became irrelevant. The site is near the coast, with frequent drizzle and occasional snow. The IP65+ enclosures hold, the point clouds show visible weather noise, but the smoothed surface stays stable. "We had two hours of data outage in twelve months, both for a planned power maintenance shutdown."
• The pile geometry changed. With reliable volume data the operators started layering material flatter. That improved the recovery rate during wheel-loader extraction and reduced dust generation — a side effect nobody had on the agenda.
• Dispatch trusts the number. This is the softest but most consequential point. When the ERP shows an inventory figure, no one calls the shift supervisor to double-check anymore.

What he would do differently in hindsight. Two things, says the plant manager: first, a second sensor should have covered the feed bunker from the start — the BUNKERS & FEEDERS variant arrived a year later as an extension. Second, the shift training should have been longer: the dashboard is intuitive, but interpreting the point-cloud visualisation ("where exactly is the material?") takes two to three hours of hands-on time.

The number he did not expect. In the first quarter after the installation, over- and underfills at the loadout bunker dropped by almost a third. Not because the system measures anything there — but because the shift now knows how much material is on the pile and stops topping up "just in case".

Volume data has a direct effect that is measured. It also has an indirect effect — on behaviour, on trust between functions — that is harder to quantify but just as real.

More on stockpile monitoring at /stockpile/, or write to info@sachtleben-technology.com.

"The biggest change is not the accuracy. It is that the argument stopped."

That is how the plant manager of a north-German mineral-processing site summarises what has changed in the twelve months since commissioning an OWL EYE® STOCKPILE installation. The site processes industrial minerals in a classic mix of crushing, classification and drying. Four piles — feed, intermediate, fine product, coarse product — have been measured continuously since August 2022.

Before the installation: weekly manual surveys with a total station, monthly reconciliation against the ERP book stock, constant friction between dispatch and operations about what was actually on the yard. An inventory gap of 3–5 % was normal. At a few thousand tonnes per finished pile, that gap translates into a six-digit valuation corridor.

Today: all four piles are scanned every ten minutes. The plant manager sees the current tonnage on a dashboard in his office, dispatch pulls the same figure directly through the OPC UA interface. The inventory gap at the last auditor visit came in at 0.7 % — inside the system's specified ±1 %.

What was not on the datasheet. Three observations from twelve months of running:

• Weather became irrelevant. The site is near the coast, with frequent drizzle and occasional snow. The IP65+ enclosures hold, the point clouds show visible weather noise, but the smoothed surface stays stable. "We had two hours of data outage in twelve months, both for a planned power maintenance shutdown."
• The pile geometry changed. With reliable volume data the operators started layering material flatter. That improved the recovery rate during wheel-loader extraction and reduced dust generation — a side effect nobody had on the agenda.
• Dispatch trusts the number. This is the softest but most consequential point. When the ERP shows an inventory figure, no one calls the shift supervisor to double-check anymore.

What he would do differently in hindsight. Two things, says the plant manager: first, a second sensor should have covered the feed bunker from the start — the BUNKERS & FEEDERS variant arrived a year later as an extension. Second, the shift training should have been longer: the dashboard is intuitive, but interpreting the point-cloud visualisation ("where exactly is the material?") takes two to three hours of hands-on time.

The number he did not expect. In the first quarter after the installation, over- and underfills at the loadout bunker dropped by almost a third. Not because the system measures anything there — but because the shift now knows how much material is on the pile and stops topping up "just in case".

Volume data has a direct effect that is measured. It also has an indirect effect — on behaviour, on trust between functions — that is harder to quantify but just as real.

More on stockpile monitoring at /stockpile/, or write to info@sachtleben-technology.com.

"The biggest change is not the accuracy. It is that the argument stopped."

That is how the plant manager of a north-German mineral-processing site summarises what has changed in the twelve months since commissioning an OWL EYE® STOCKPILE installation. The site processes industrial minerals in a classic mix of crushing, classification and drying. Four piles — feed, intermediate, fine product, coarse product — have been measured continuously since August 2022.

Before the installation: weekly manual surveys with a total station, monthly reconciliation against the ERP book stock, constant friction between dispatch and operations about what was actually on the yard. An inventory gap of 3–5 % was normal. At a few thousand tonnes per finished pile, that gap translates into a six-digit valuation corridor.

Today: all four piles are scanned every ten minutes. The plant manager sees the current tonnage on a dashboard in his office, dispatch pulls the same figure directly through the OPC UA interface. The inventory gap at the last auditor visit came in at 0.7 % — inside the system's specified ±1 %.

What was not on the datasheet. Three observations from twelve months of running:

• Weather became irrelevant. The site is near the coast, with frequent drizzle and occasional snow. The IP65+ enclosures hold, the point clouds show visible weather noise, but the smoothed surface stays stable. "We had two hours of data outage in twelve months, both for a planned power maintenance shutdown."
• The pile geometry changed. With reliable volume data the operators started layering material flatter. That improved the recovery rate during wheel-loader extraction and reduced dust generation — a side effect nobody had on the agenda.
• Dispatch trusts the number. This is the softest but most consequential point. When the ERP shows an inventory figure, no one calls the shift supervisor to double-check anymore.

What he would do differently in hindsight. Two things, says the plant manager: first, a second sensor should have covered the feed bunker from the start — the BUNKERS & FEEDERS variant arrived a year later as an extension. Second, the shift training should have been longer: the dashboard is intuitive, but interpreting the point-cloud visualisation ("where exactly is the material?") takes two to three hours of hands-on time.

The number he did not expect. In the first quarter after the installation, over- and underfills at the loadout bunker dropped by almost a third. Not because the system measures anything there — but because the shift now knows how much material is on the pile and stops topping up "just in case".

Volume data has a direct effect that is measured. It also has an indirect effect — on behaviour, on trust between functions — that is harder to quantify but just as real.

More on stockpile monitoring at /stockpile/, or write to info@sachtleben-technology.com.