Case Study: World’s Largest Fully Integrated Zinc and Lead Smelting and Refining Company achieves $2.1M cost avoidance and improved equipment reliability with Aspen Technology’s Mtell

Optimizing Smelting and Refining Equipment Reliability with Prescriptive Analytics

The World’s Largest Fully Integrated Zinc and Lead Smelting and Refining Company needed a way for its reliability team to better track, detect and prevent equipment failures, improve preventative maintenance, and strengthen environmental and safety safeguards. To address this, the site partnered with Aspen Technology and deployed the Mtell machine‑learning solution to analyze process historian data and provide early warnings of degradation.

Aspen Technology implemented Mtell autonomous agents that learn normal process signatures, predict time‑to‑failure (for example, ~40 days on a crucial pump), trigger actionable warnings, and can even auto‑file work orders. The solution monitors hundreds of assets in real time, reduced false positives, changed maintenance practices, and delivered measurable impact — approximately $2.1M USD in cost avoidance in 2016 and even greater savings in 2017, along with improved safety and environmental performance.