Faced with the ongoing challenge of being price sensitive in new capital projects, original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) must also ensure that their product and service offering helps create a sustainable foundation for the end customer’s ongoing profitability and efficiency.
“Being cost competitive upfront includes delivering on time and on specification,” says Kim Schoepflin, CEO of vibrating screen specialist Kwatani. “Once equipment is operational, however, OEMs still need to make sure that their equipment provides the lowest total cost of ownership.”
Meeting all the necessary performance criteria means both the process ‘duty’ requirements – managing the required throughput and product – as well as the structural and mechanical demands of durability, ease of maintenance and reliability.
Kwatani’s extensive in-house technical capacity to custom design and manufacture vibrating screens for a range of different applications allows it to align its equipment not only to closely meet the customer’s process requirements, but also to accommodate the existing plant infrastructure.
“We work closely with the EPC or the mine on the interface between the infrastructure and our equipment,” she says. “This may involve optimising the dynamic loading of a screen, taking into account the features and capacity of the plant structure, to avoid costly and time consuming plant modifications.”
It may even extend to offering advice on resonance issues where there are a number of vibrating screens operating in close proximity. The company’s experts have also been requested on occasion to assist with an appropriate chute design, which can influence the performance and life-span of the screen.
“At Kwatani, we are keenly aware that engineering costs on a mining project must be contained at every opportunity, so we minimise the impact that our equipment has on the number of hours that an EPC must invest in project engineering and implementation,” says Schoepflin. “We work to accommodate the client’s plant design by matching the footprint of our machines to those constraints wherever possible.”
She emphasises that this kind of adaptation is only possible with custom designed equipment, which is a key factor in Kwatani’s focus on engineered solutions rather than off-the-shelf products. Schoepflin also highlights reliability as non-negotiable when it comes to meeting project deadlines, as tight schedules are usually the order of the day in any capital project.
With an extensive reference base across the mining sector, Kwatani has recently constructed a heavy-duty grizzly feeder and a sizing screen for Vedanta Zinc International’s Gamsberg zinc project near Aggeneys in the Northern Cape. Another recent contract will see the company delivering six large screens to Pan African Resources’ Elikhulu gold retreatment plant at Evander.