The ReSoURCE Project makes an important contribution to the reduction of CO2 and considering the size of the consortium with 9 partners and a budget of 8.5 million Euros, it is by no means a small project. Independently of the funding project, RHI Magnesita ordered an automated sorting plant, which is essential for the project ReSoURCE. As this plant had to be designed highly adapted to the requirements and needs of RHI Magnesita, the customization of the overall plant claims specialized experience in measurement technology, interfacing, and automation.

As you can imagine, handling such an order is not a simple process. It all started with our biweekly meetings. In these biweekly meetings, the actual status regarding engineering and design was presented by LSA. A preselected team of RHI Magnesita experts was involved to optimize the process of development. Combining RHI Magnesita’s knowledge and LSA’s process experience, we were able to develop a compelling design that met all requirements and will enable ReSoURCE to be a great and successful project.

In addition to the design itself, we wrote a technical documentation showing the current state of all components and functionalities. It was deliberately intended to be an open process involving experts from different areas of RHI Magnesita. We wanted to make sure, that they were able to see the design of the system at an early stage in order to comment or identify potential challenges as early as possible. As a result, more and more detailed designs were presented during the biweekly meetings and each iteration took the design closer to the final version.

As you might have learned from our first post A Legal Issue, also contractual matters must be clarified in such processes. In addition to general contract conditions, such as delivery times and delivery terms, acceptance criteria for the entire plant must also be defined (performance values). Performance values, which are always defined in advance of such projects, are measurable acceptance criteria. Such criteria can be, for example, the throughput in tons per hour or the sorting accuracy in % that the system should achieve under defined conditions.

Once the concept was agreed and accepted, the purchase price was negotiated, and the order was placed.

Both, the development of machines in the field of laser-based analytics determines the daily business of LSA GmbH, as well as the implementation of international research projects with various project partners. In this case, the system and the project are very special in more ways than one. On the one hand, it is a very labor and budget intensive project, which is of course very exciting and interesting, but at the same time requires a lot of discipline and strict management. On the other hand, we want to make a green contribution to the industry with our systems, so this is not only very interesting for us in terms of scaling and application, but also a personal concern.