Fire protection infrastructure management in the mining industry.

The Sperosens group of companies is an established and respected provider of Fire Protection and Telemetry solutions to the African mining and industrial sectors.  

Sperosens’ services include design, supply, installation, management, maintenance and support.

The ongoing management and maintenance of installed fire protection systems is a legal requirement under the mine health and safety act and remains a challenge for customers.

On many sites these infrastructures include straightforward items such as extinguishers, hose reels and hydrants, but also more complicated assets such as conveyor belts, pumpstations and electrical installations. 

These infrastructures can easily include 5 000 pieces of equipment and more, all of which must be inspected, tested, calibrated, serviced and maintained. These infrastructures are often maintained by multiple vendors using disparate and primarily paper-based business processes.

The end result is that some 90 000 activities per annum must be co-ordinated, managed and reported on per site. This presents quite a challenge given that the underlying business processes are typically not automated and often forms part of different functional areas with-in the customer.

Sperosens developed the Verifi system to transform the way these infrastructures are managed and to provide ongoing visibility of the

performance of these infrastructures and the status of the maintenance and other services procured in respect thereof. The system is ideally suited to facilitate the management of distributed fire infrastructures in complex industrial environments.

The Verifi solution combines passive NFC tags, mobile readers, IoT monitoring devices, IoT gateways and a centralised cloud-based platform to gather performance and services data and to provide full visibility of all fire infrastructure related activities as well as continuous monitoring of critical fire events and parameters. In addition, related information can be imported from external SCADA databases.

Maintenance and other services performed are managed and controlled by way of NFC tags and mobile readers with pre-loaded operating procedures on the mobile device.

Distributed Fire Infrastructure Management, as practiced through the Verifi system, allows the customer to:

• Gain visibility of the status and performance of distributed fire assets.
• Gain control over the operational/maintenance activities (standard operating procedures) performed in respect of these assets, including the scheduling/timing thereof.
• Produce integrated reporting in respect of all activities performed, incidents occurred, inspections/processes failed, corrective actions taken and the status thereof, as well as a full audit trail of the process.
• Control all processes through an automated business process management system, this includes all the relevant procedures, exception reporting, corrective actions, escalations, impairment processes, and the like.

Benefits of Verifi:

• Manage distributed fire infrastructure from one central management system.
• Ability to control and measure the service provider’s performance against pre-defined scope.
• Perform continuous monitoring of critical fire infrastructures such as pumps, reservoirs, valves, generators, conveyor belts etc.
• Link the outputs from the Verifi system to existing customer systems like control rooms, call centres, email and ERP systems.
• Guaranteed ongoing compliance to legislation and external regulations while providing the audit trails to evidence full time compliance.
• Have full visibility of the status, cost, compliance and performance of its distributed fire protection infrastructure.

Sperosens products and solutions are deve-loped in-house, by either using own IP only, or by integrating this with standard off-the-shelf components available in the open market.

Sperosens is an ISO 9001:2015 certified company and the business is managed in accordance with these principles.

Contact details:

Sperosens

Tel: +27 (0) 12 665 0317

Marihette Hattingh, mh@spero.co.za

E-mail: info@spero.co.za 

Web: www.spero.co.za