Case Study: Barrick Gold achieves disciplined, profitable production with RtTech Software (RtDUET)

Barrick Gold’s vision for ‘Disciplined, Profitable Production’ with RtDUET

Barrick Gold, the world’s largest gold miner, faced a sharp market downturn and rising costs in 2012 that squeezed margins and forced a strategic shift to “disciplined, profitable production.” At the Pueblo Viejo mine — processing over one million ounces a year and generating roughly $200,000 per hour — Barrick needed accurate production loss accounting, standardized metrics and reporting, and a way to focus maintenance on the issues with the greatest production impact.

Barrick implemented RtDUET, a downtime-capture platform integrated with OSIsoft PI and Barrick’s asset-management systems. RtDUET provided automatic detection of slowdowns and stoppages, manual event entry and splitting, supervisor approvals, web-based interfaces and automated shift notifications, plus automatic calculation of metrics (availability, utilization, MTBF). The system enabled Barrick to pinpoint failure causes and frequencies, prioritize maintenance, quantify losses, standardize reporting enterprise-wide and secure capital for targeted improvements — improving plant availability and production accountability.

Barrick Gold

Paul Yaroshak

Senior Process Control Engineer