GEOAngol

We partnered with Angola's pioneering gold refinery to build a manufacturing control system that gives the facility real-time visibility over every gram of precious metal moving through its production chain — from intake and weighing, through chemical analysis, to the finished product leaving the refinery.

The challenge

A gold refinery lives or dies by traceability. Material changes state and custody many times between arrival and final output, and every handover is a point where weight, purity, and accountability have to be recorded without error. The refinery needed a single system that could follow material across all of its sections, talk directly to the industrial hardware on the floor, and leave an audit trail that management and external stakeholders could trust.

Off-the-shelf manufacturing software did not fit the specifics of refinery operations, and a fully bespoke build from scratch would not have fit the timeline. The operation needed something dependable, delivered fast, in an environment where requirements would keep sharpening as the teams on the ground used the system.

What we built

Working in Mendix, our team delivered a control platform that integrates directly with the refinery's hardware:

• Precision scales feed live weight measurements into the system at every weighing station, removing manual transcription from the most error-sensitive step in the process.
• RFX chemical analysis equipment results are captured against each batch, so purity data travels with the material instead of living in a separate record.
• Barcode scanning ties physical custody to digital records at each handover, giving each movement between refinery sections an accountable owner and timestamp.

On top of the hardware layer, the platform models the refinery's workflow section by section, so supervisors see where material is, what state it is in, and what happened to it at every prior step — a complete chain of custody rather than a set of disconnected logs.

How we worked

A five-person Alongside team — project manager, UI/UX designer, Mendix developers, and quality assurance — delivered the platform in five months. Choosing a low-code core let us spend the schedule where it mattered: hardware integration, workflow modelling with the people who run the refinery, and testing against real operating conditions rather than assumptions. Design work focused on the operators' reality — screens used at industrial workstations, by people handling material, where clarity beats density.

The outcome

The refinery now tracks every gram of precious metal through the entire production chain in one system. Weights come from calibrated hardware instead of manual entry, purity data is attached to the material it describes, and every section handover is recorded. For one of Africa's most ambitious mining ventures, that means transparency and operational control that scale with the facility — and a platform that can keep absorbing new requirements as the operation grows.

Looking for a team that can build around your physical operations? Talk to us about product development.