Aurelia Metals: OMCS Consultants Champion ICS Uplift
Aurelia Metals' Peak Mine, in the Cobar Basin of New South Wales, runs several polymetallic underground mines alongside an 800ktpa gold and base metals processing plant. Like any mine and processing plant, Peak Mine depends on Industrial Control System (ICS) technologies to monitor and manage processing and material movement, with built-in functional safety features protecting people, plant, and the environment.
The quality and integrity of an ICS can make or break production. Reliability and maintenance challenges are not unique to this site or this industry, but the value of change is hard to pin down when a system is currently functional and the expected returns are indirect, tied to cost avoidance rather than new output.
Discovering What Matters to the Business
Understanding a system's current technical state is essential to establishing a baseline, the starting point for any credible path to a future state. But a future state built purely on the evolution of existing technology or assets is not, on its own, a reason to move forward. It has to connect with the business's actual expectations and drivers for success. Miss those inputs and even a technically excellent outcome, one that hits every best-practice benchmark, can land with limited business value.
Investigation and Auditing
Legacy systems, and even modern plant built on a lean budget, rarely benefit from the latest available technology. Reconfiguring how a business operates carries real risk, so chasing the “latest” is often impractical. But the cyber risk era is changing the calculation: downtime that once came only from physical asset failure can now come from exposure that was previously invisible.
Building a credible baseline means reviewing technology and people systems against reliability, current operational challenges, business aspirations, and the need for better data. Defining “what you have” sounds simple, but it does far more than tidy up documents and drawings, it surfaces risk and exposes pain points the business hadn't named yet. That kind of investigation is best done by someone who goes deep inside operations to find the issues and constraints that matter.
The Control Systems Advisor Role
As OT and control systems advisors, subject matter experts need a broad perspective: electrical, instrumentation, data, control devices, network devices, software systems, and human factors all sit under the same umbrella. There is rarely time to uncover everything that happened in the past, or why. Once the baseline is established, possible future states can be developed against what genuinely matters to the business, creating a springboard for moving forward, not a reason to keep circling back to where things started.
Developing the Roadmap
With a clear view of the business's top requirements, prioritisation can happen, balanced against commercial reality, to shape a roadmap. A program of works then articulates how the work is staged to traverse that roadmap with a rational sense of direction. Clarity on why each program exists gives it purpose, and gives the business the information it needs to pause or continue if the inputs change mid journey.
Program Development
At Peak Mine, several ICS network and control systems challenges were holding back operational performance. Technology end-of-life, better practices, and cyber risk were among the factors weighed in assessing the Operational Management and Control Systems (OMCS). Once the program was finalised and the cost-benefit case presented, it was clear the next stage beyond strategic roadmap advice was direct, hands-on system analysis and remedial work.
Any program needs a resourcing approach that blends insourcing, outsourcing, and shared delivery, with defined accountability and controls, since simply adding people to a room rarely improves on what came before. A coordinated program, driven by validated business requirements, guides progressive decision-making and builds the corporate support that comes from everyone being part of the journey.
This is about creating a springboard for launching forward, never to return to the previous launch point.