Customer Story

Kaunis Iron uses Novacura Flow to integrate their systems

June 10, 2020

Kaunis Iron is located in the municipality of Pajala in northern Sweden, a sparsely populated area close to the Finnish border. The area is rich in iron ore, which makes it a great place for an iron mine.

Northland Resources began constructing the mine in Kaunisvaara in December 2011.

However, the mine went bankrupt in October 2014 due to low iron ore prices and high debts. Kaunis Iron took over the bankruptcy estate in 2018.

Taking over an existing yet bankrupt property meant there was a lot of pressure to get the production up and running—and showing a profit—as quickly as possible. Additionally, the remote location of the mine meant that some key staff were only able to be on-site part of the time. Mobility and remote tools were on the top of Kaunis Iron’s list of requirements.

Kaunis Iron has worked with several different systems and wanted to find the way to retrieve data from their systems and make it available for mobile devices. Theirs systems were good enough to cover particular business requirements but none of these could provide solution for general integration. Kaunis Iron came to the conclusion early in the project that each system has its benefits and is ready to deliver that data to another system. With Novacura they went mobile and were able to implement a solution to combine data from different systems.

Once the systems were connected, Novacura created a production reporting app so that employees and contractors could receive hourly and daily production reports. The app allows them to see current output, compare output to previous days, and plan ahead to meet the next day’s goal.

The Novacura solution also includes applications for workers to submit/process work orders, report their time, receive goods to the warehouse, and issue warehouse materials as needed. All the applications work on both desktop and mobile devices.

I think it’s freaking impressive what [Kaunis Iron] have done: they’ve restarted a mine and made it successful,. They had a plan, they stuck to the plan, and they have so far delivered better than predicted.

Östen Westman

Novacura, Sales Director

The data gave Kaunis Iron answers on how to do all the development. Kaunis Iron was able to achieve their main goal, which was to use Novacura and IFS as the base platform for data. Large production system for managing the mine, and the ABB system for managing the enrichment process was integrated under digital control system umbrella. They are able still to collect data from these systems and combine everything with economic numbers. Novacura was now implemented to maintain and manage of spare parts for the whole company.