Crowdsourcing on large scale
ALCOA has used an online crowdsourcing competition to connect with some of the world’s smartest people to improve the descaling process at its Wagerup Alumina Refinery in WA. The company collaborated with Unearthed, an innovative online business which connects the resources industry to thousands of developers, data scientists and innovators around the world who pitch novel and diverse solutions to industry challenges. Called Scale Away, the competition challenged participants to come up with ways to more efficiently descale tanks, vessels and pipes. During the refining process, which involves extracting alumina from bauxite, scale builds up and causes lost production from reduced available tank volume. Its removal is costly and is time consuming. More than 90 innovators from 20 countries registered…