The cooperation between Tapojärvi and Hydroline
Years ago, our collaboration with Tapojärvi Oy began with the servicing of their hydraulic cylinders. Now, the collaboration has widened with the introduction of our smart solution to solve their business challenges.
Tapojärvi Oy, a world-class mining and mill service provider, needs no introduction. However, the journey of the last 66 years hasn’t been easy. A one-man’s army, whose passion grew into a large corporation, is now managed by his third generation. The company’s strong will, implementation capacity, curiosity, and courage to face challenges are what keep it going. It is one of the companies that is always looking forward to new possibilities and believes in evolving with the latest trends. Tapojärvi aims to be the global leader in the industrial circular economy by 2035, and Hydroline is supporting Tapojärvi to achieve this goal. Though Tapojärvi’s journey, challenges, and operating methods differ from those of Hydroline, one thing that both companies share is the passion to provide quality solutions to their customers.
Major challenge
The company has decades of experience and core competencies in mining and mill services. Because the machines operate in harsh conditions, both underground and in open-pit mines, the job is demanding as well as challenging. The machines are constantly working in an environment, which causes wear and tear, and eventually, a possible breakdown of the machine. One can only imagine how many safety risks and inefficiencies sudden breakdowns can bring to a mining business. Even if the machines are not used for an hour, there is going to be a significant effect on the production capabilities as well as financial loss, and that is where Tapojärvi needed a helping hand and a solution to make the work even safer, effective as well as efficient.
Why Hydroline?
For Tapojärvi, the safety of their employees and the quality of their machines were the key factors. Nowadays, machines come with an inbuilt system that tells the positioning of a machine and how it is performing. However, that inbuilt system is not enough as most of the mechanical equipment structures are complicated. Tapojärvi has been using the OEM and non-OEM systems to monitor the alerts as well as other statistical data. Moreover, they have their own system to process the data from multiple sources. However, the company was looking for a system that could tell about the actual strain on the machine and get to the root cause of the breakdowns, and therefore, a condition monitoring system was needed.
The collaboration between Hydroline and Tapojärvi is not new. They have been working together on servicing hydraulic cylinders for years, and therefore, broader cooperation was natural.
How Hydroline helped Tapojärvi?
The needs as well as the feedback have been well received by Hydroline. After discussing the crucial factors, Hydroline’s LEO comes to the rescue. LEO tells you everything you need to know about the cylinders in your machines and the overall machines. A tool is needed which is more than predictive maintenance. LEO monitors the cylinders in real-time and analyzes what the machines are experiencing on the field.
The trial of LEO began to find the solution for the underground loader cylinders where the damage was assumed to be caused by high pressure. Later, a broader feedback system for machine operators was implemented. Saku Puhakka, Project Engineer said, “LEO gives feedback directly to the operators. It analyzes long-time trends and combines them with data from other sources such as production values. This increases the lifetime of a cylinder instead of just knowing when it breaks.”
According to Tapojärvi, “the key feature of LEO is instant feedback to the machine operators. Not only does this help educate operators on machine usage, but it also helps assess operator performance within the shift rather than weeks or months later.”
LEO provides its users with an optimized as well as a convenient solution. However, it offers additional advantages to its users –
- lifecycle monitoring
- troubleshooting and prediction
- safety factors
- optimized process and machine use
- total workload and efficiency
- predictable and optimized maintenance
However, for Tapojärvi, the challenge they are trying to resolve with LEO is to provide feedback to the operators on the intended limits of the machinery so that they can stay within those limits and reduce the need for unplanned maintenance. In a nutshell, availability and lower maintenance costs are the most beneficial solutions for Tapojärvi.