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Zama Zamas meet PSIM

Physical Security Information Management (PSIM) software developer CNL Software and E-thele SQD Networks a local company involved in the design, implementation and support of situational management and PSIM solutions will provide an integrated security management solution to one of the world’s largest producers of gold.

This specific mine in South Africa has the on-going challenge of protecting its gold, tools and equipment against theft through illegal mining activities by Zama Zamas (illegal miners) and by miners employed by the organisation. Mining organisations have a duty of care to protect staff and visitors; consequently safety records can be influenced negatively by death or injury of illegal miners as they are legally recorded as if they were employees. Access control, therefore, is not only a key component of the security operation, but also a major factor in the health and safety compliance policy. As well as securing the mines themselves there is also a need to secure gold in transit.

To reduce the theft of assets and the number of injuries on duty, the mining client will use IPSecurityCenter to expand their existing CCTV video surveillance capability while optimising the significant investment in currently installed legacy technologies such as access control, physical alarm systems, fire detection, perimeter intrusion detection and video analytics technologies.

“IPSecurityCenter will provide the client’s operators with real-time situation awareness, guiding the response teams over vast areas both above and below ground. At the same time IPSecurityCenter will collect data for reporting, forensic investigation and evidence gathering purposes”, explains Wolfgang Engling, MD at E-thele SQD. “Building on the initial CCTV and access control integration the plan is to incorporate facial recognition, GIS, body scanners and asset tracking as well as other security and operations systems.

“The key factor was the level of security they could expect from a solution and the expected level of return on investment”, explains Manica Sanders, business development manager at E-thele. “IPSecurityCenter will enable this gold mine giant to improve its security solutions while optimising currently installed, disparate security technologies. The scada software will later be integrated onto the same common platform, which will be one of the first attempts at marrying operations with security onto a common operating system. The cost of the IPSecurityCenter solution versus the estimated savings in preventing gold theft was a good security investment for the organisation.”

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