ABB Switzerland, in collaboration with ABB Australia, organized a Gearless Mill Drive User Meeting in Sydney, Australia, on 16th and 17th November 2006.
Baden, 22nd December 2006 - ABB, the leading power and automation technology group, announces that it has held a Gearless Mill Drive (GMD) user meeting for its customers in the Oceanian region. Therefore GMD end users, potential future partners as well as mill suppliers from various mines and cement plants in Australia, Asia, the USA and South Africa were invited to Australia. The main idea of the convention was to exchange experiences, knowledge and ideas in order to ease and improve the future collaboration.
ABB has installed or won orders for over 50 gearless mill drive units in 18 countries on five continents. The gearless mill drive business is an important market for ABB and it is crucial to maintain an open and good relationship with the users. Customers need to know exactly who from ABB to approach in case of queries and difficulties on site, whereas ABB needs to know where to improve its performance.
End users from eight different Companies accepted the invitation to Sydney’s Hotel Intercontinental.
The meeting agenda covered the following GMD-specific topics: Maintenance and service concepts as well as service options, possibilities and limits. Also on the agenda were issues like new developments, problems experienced with ABB’s GMDs and Training.
Operators from various mines have gained, after several years with ABB’s equipment, valuable experiences. ABB respectively, during the same period of time, has gained a lot of new knowledge in the GMD ambit. Now the gearless mill drive users had the chance to talk about their positive as well as negative experiences with ABB equipment and were given answers to their questions.
Eric Gilfillan, Manager Electrical Engineering, Anglo Technical Division, South Africa said: "I was very impressed with the idea and the execution of this meeting. I appreciate the gearless mill drives Team’s sincerity in regarding not only successes but also failures. I also appreciated getting to know the other users and being able to share information with them. I would like to carry on being part of this network!"
Also the team from ABB could profit by learning directly from the customers about what concerns and problems they have and in particular by having the chance to learn about interesting proposals for future collaboration.
Phillip Gunn, Senior Electrical Engineer, Newcrest (Telfer Gold Mine) Mining commented that "It was a good interaction between ABB and the customers. I think the two parties learnt a lot from each other, because in reality problems often do not go back to the supplier. A meeting like this is where the information can come forward, and the sort of discussion we had, is very good."
Thanks to contributions from both parties a lot of ideas and considerations were exchanged. The conference was highly interactive and resulted in valuable new plans.
ABB (www.abb.com) is a leader in power and automation technologies that enable utility and industry customers to improve performance while lowering environmental impact. The ABB Group of companies operates in around 100 countries and employs about 107,000 people.