San Rafael is the main tin producing mine in South America and the fourth largest in the world. It is located in the eastern Andes and produces around 10% of the world’s tin.

To date, the site has maintained a high level of sustainability and environmental responsibility, including with its waste management. Now, the company has planned to build a new reprocessing plant, known as the B2 project. The process of managing a significant number of queues requires complex setup. It includes many different processing spaces, mechanical and electrical systems, and an extensive pipeline network, requiring the participation of a wide variety of disciplines and specialized engineers.

The visualization of a construction of a complex nature

The company believed that the development of this complex project and its many subsystems would be better understood if construction progress could be fully visualized at each stage , with an easy exchange of information between owner Minsur and its main contractor .

Although the original feasibility schedule for the B2 project in San Rafael had been created in Primavera P6, and this was still the tool of choice for the prime contractor, it would not easily allow Minsur to maintain a continuous visualization of 4D as built. So the company set out to bridge that gap. He chose the  Powerproject  of Elecosoft, not only for its interoperability and data exchange with Primavera, which would be used as a platform for the program during the entire construction Cosapi, the prime contractor for the construction, but also because Minsur could easily take information progress and view it in a 4D BIM program, through the Powerproject BIM module.

Fieldwork preparation

The first step that was taken was to convert all the original 3D modeling of the plant into complete IFC (Industry Foundation Class) files, considered as the basic interoperability standard for BIM data. The second essential step was to convert the original baseline schedules from the Primavera P6 .XER format into Powerproject files.

Carlos Peñaloza, Lead Planner for Project B2, said: ” The conversion process was easy and fast. Converting the construction program tasks from P6 to Powerproject only took a few seconds.  ” We checked the dates and links to make sure the data had been converted correctly, and all of them matched perfectly . “
The last critical step was to create an easily repeatable and time-efficient process for updating the 4D program with Primavera’s weekly progress updates – because entering this information manually would have effectively been impossible.
José Luis Hurtado, B2 project control manager, said: ” We couldn’t force our contractors to use our chosen tool, Powerproject, but we knew that updating progress manually would take too much precious time for our team .”

Reducing reporting demands

To enable the weekly report, APP Consulting recommended the use of an Elecosoft Powerproject add-on that could automate the updates of the .XER file directly in the Powerproject files.

Peñaloza explained: ” We just have to let the macro work – so it only takes 60 seconds each week to update all the programming .”

This meant that each week the 4D program could be quickly updated to produce 4D BIM reports in various formats.

Using Powerproject BIM and another Elecosoft tool, O2C, the team was also able to generate flipbooks to show weekly progress, videos comparing actual progress to the original baseline, and 3D files so managers could view progress in a format. interactive. O2C is a compression tool that allows you to present high-speed animated 3D objects in a compact format that can be easily incorporated into presentations and reports. Although Minsur’s enterprise technology was capable of handling the processing demands of 3D modeling, the same could not be assumed for all parties.

Establishment of a new reporting standard

These capabilities, along with 4D scheduling data, enabled the project team to show progress not only weekly to the management team but also monthly to senior executives. The rich 3D visualization, animations, and progress details that these reports now contain have changed expectations and set a new standard for the quality of the reports the team expects to be required in future projects.

The project team leaders were satisfied with their selection of tools. Hurtado concluded:

” Among various 4D solutions on the market, we chose Powerproject for the simplicity of connecting the main program with the 3D models. We are confident that we will replicate it in future projects .”

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