Gold Producer Manages Environmental Data

Eldorado Gold Corporationis a gold producer active in exploration and development. The company is headquartered in Vancouver, Canada but with operations in USA, Brazil, China, Greece, Turkey and surrounding regions. The Kisladağ gold mine, the largest gold mine in Turkey, requires a software system to manage their environmental data. After a comprehensive search, and being impressed by the wide application of our Monitor Pro software at mines across the world, Kisladağ decided that MP-5 is the ideal tool to manage their compliance issues and to handle their environmental reporting requirements. Gulden Yuksel, Environment Manager at the site explains ‘EHS Data Ltd allowed us to use their system on a trial basis in order for us to understand the system and how it works, they really made an effort on to explain the system to us during this time.’

The site has been developed as low grade bulk tonnage open pit operation using heap leaching for gold recovery. The team need to manage a range of data including noise, dust surface water, groundwater and weather. The new system replaces dozens of spreadsheets and will be used by five staff. The process of importing historical data is underway and the system represents a holistic environment in which to manage and report on the data.

One of the key issues for Eldorado Gold for this implementation has been driven by their international footprint. Most obviously this has meant a need to produce reports in different languages (Turkish and English). This has been a simple operation in the software since Kisladağ have been able to define Turkish words and their English translation with the Turkish being used in Turkish reports and vice versa. The MP-5 user defined fields system was used for this. The reporting engine in the system is Crystal Reports which enables the creation of report formats in different languages and alphabets.

Perhaps less obviously is the need to cope with different formats in data across Europe and North America, particularly since one of Kisladağ’s analytical laboratories is ALS in Canada. So for example ‘one hundred thousand in Europe’ is 100,000 whereas in Canada it is 100.000; ‘one and one tenth’ in the United Kingdom and most of North America is 1.1 in Europe it is 1,1; the ‘12th June 2008’ in Europe is 12/6/2008 in North America it is 6/12/2008. Also the Kisladağ noise meters report dates with dots (e.g. 12.06.2008). Therefore a key part of this implementation has been to configure MP-5 to automatically recognise different formats, provide an audit trail for the data and report it in the correct format to be
understandable to readers in the different geographies.

For many clients with sites in different geographies across the world this is a must. Gulden Yuksel again ‘…it is good that we will be able to obtain both Turkish and English reports from the system. We are managed by an overseas company and reports in both languages are essential as a consequence. We have also been very happy regarding the technical support we have received and EHS data are always helpful and responsive enabling us to solve problems quickly. We are continuing to import the last five years worth of data and hope to complete this work by the end of 2009. After that the system will be effectively used for our daily, weekly, monthly and annual environmental reports.’