Case Study: Copper Smelter

More Payable Metal, Not Process Loss – How Subatix surfaced leaks and helped to build fixes across Cu production plant.

Client

Integrated Cu smelter - concentrate to cathode operations with five core processes

Outcome

Total Indicative Financial Outcome

$20–30M/yr within 12–24 months

Why they decided to try Subatix?

The Suspicion

Leadership suspected that more output was possible but didn't have a clear starting point

The Question

They needed a fast, fact-based answer to "What can we improve and what comes first?"

The Approach

Subatix ran an ops-only diagnostic to establish the baseline and quantify improvement potential

The Outcome

Building a sequenced, owner-assigned opportunity backlog

What we did, in 4 weeks

/01Subatix benchmarked 60+ ops metrics against 35+ internal peak windows, mapped 85+ interdependencies, and established a defendable baseline and improvement potential

/02We customized Subatix to Client specifics and onboarded ops team to use it

/03Using Subatix ops team reviewed 50+ root causes and build validated opportunity pack with >80% of initially diagnosed production uplift

/04Client moved to improvement initiatives design phase using Subatix AI workspace with our ad-hoc support

What we found

Throughput uplift

+12–15%

Capacity unlock with sequencing across reliability, thermal, and cycle stability.

Quality & recovery

94.2% → 97.1% recovery (2.9 pp)

Tied directly to raw-material quality control and converting discipline.

Energy intensity

0.68 → 0.78

Via thermal efficiency and energy management system.

Reliability

OEE 72% → 85% (13 pp)

By lifting MTBF and cutting MTTR on bottlenecks.

Result

A single, operations-owned prioritized opportunity backlog with established baseline and target state, identified owners with solutions design path and tool. So, ops team knows what to do first, who does it, what's needed, and how it will help the whole system.