Gindalbie’s Karara Iron Ore Project (KIOP)was set to be a major player in the iron ore industry. The minesite located 230km inland from Geraldton will be mining the higher quality magnetite as opposed to the standard hematite.
TracBASE was approached early in the piece and we were able to integrate well into the fabrication aspect of the structural steel as well as manning up on site to handle the deliveries and material management.
Karara had the fabrication done by the then 50-50% partner Ansteel (Angang Group China) – the second largest fabricator of steel in China. The fabrication was done in a small city called Bayuquan in the Liaoning Province located on the northeast coast of the Bohai Sea and in the northwest part of the Liaodong Peninsula, it is 46 kilometres south-southwest of Yingkou city centre.
We mobilised our team to China before commencement of fabrication to allow sufficient time to setup TracBASE and the databases. In total, we had our team in China for 13 months during the fabrication phase and other members onsite at Karara for 9 months.
The fabrication process involved tracking the following TracBASE Milestones;
- Cutting Complete
- Fitup Complete
- Welding Complete
- Blasting Complete
- Painting Complete
- Loaded
- Shipment Departs (China)
- Shipment Arrives (Aust)
- Issued
The fabrication tracking was done via Motorola PDA scanners and an assortment of cutting spreadsheets that gave daily progress. In total we had 16 Chinese nationals working with our team and successfully tracked and shipped over 18,000 tonnes of fabricated stick steel in 2,000 containers.