Data a hot commodity in country’s mining sector
Challenge is how to use it to its maximum potential to add real value, writes Pedro van Gaalen
Responding to market challenges such as commodity price volatility, policy variability, shifting global demand and a rising cost base requires an agile and nimble mining operation.
“This necessitates engineering solutions that can help mining companies prosper in the new digital age. However, few know how to leverage technology to add real value to their operations,” says Denver Dreyer, Senior Vice-President Mining, Minerals & Metals for Europe, Middle East and Africa at Worley.
While a lack of funding and adequate skills, and the need for large incumbents to sweat their assets, have constrained digital transformation locally, discussions around digitalisation are advancing.
“Digital transformation is different from the traditional work paradigm, particularly in the mining sector, which hasn’t seen changes to mining methods in decades. A mindset shift within the entire project team is required, including on the customers’ side, to embrace digital technology and understand its immense potential benefits.”
Dreyer notes that it is vital to partner with a service provider with industry experience and the technical expertise to offer customers a roadmap to help navigate what is unfamiliar territory for many. This will become key as the development and deployment of new digital technologies accelerates.
“Even in the early stages of their digital transformation journey, mining companies can increase productivity, reduce costs and improve production and safety quickly through the visualisation of data across the entire value chain,” suggests Cameron Tandy, MD for Accenture Resources Africa.
Data management technologies are emerging as a particularly hot commodity within the mining industry.
“Solutions and capabilities that create connected mines, such as cloud-enabled mobility, big data-powered analytics and the Internet of Things, can help mining operations reach new levels of performance by putting the right information in the hands of mining operation managers, supervisors, operators and head office to help them make better decisions across an integrated production chain.”
Says Dreyer: “The challenge lies not in obtaining the data, but how to use it to its maximum potential to add real value to customers and organisations, particularly in a technologicallystagnant sector such as mining.”
Investments into data visualisation dashboard solutions can provide visibility across the organisation, which can create cost, time and operational efficiencies by identifying bottlenecks.
Tandy highlights the potential to use the data companies already have at their disposal more efficiently, which can unlock appreciable value without incurring significant upfront costs.
“Once consolidated, powerful analytics can run existing and new data sets to provide operational intelligence and trend analyses, which can be visualised on tablets, smart devices, desktops and in operation centres. Leveraging data analytics in this manner enables miners to understand their operation better and embed productivity improvements through dynamic planning and proactive scheduling, predictive maintenance, dynamic dispatching and blending based on customer order and market economics,” says Tandy.
These capabilities create agile and more sustainable mining operations that are better positioned to cut their base costs by reducing wastage.
According to Dreyer, data management tools can also expediently create option analyses to assist customers and prospective funders in making strategic investment decisions, while integrated design project tools can create a living digital twin of a facility that can reduce risk and improve productivity.
Tandy adds that the digital twin concept offers an immersive virtual environment that merges short-, mediumand long-term planning horizons to help miners make value-driven decisions across a range of operations, from the boardroom to mine sites. “With these data-derived insights, capital expenditure becomes more focused, and companies can derive the intended yield from their investments.”
And by creating efficiencies with the data companies already have, they can then use the cost savings to fund the next phase in their digital transformation roadmap. “This means it’s an iterative, step-change process, which doesn’t happen overnight. Visibility is vital to ensure it progresses effectively and achieves the defined KPIs within each stage of this evolution. More importantly, companies must understand that what they implement today will impact the sophistication of the connected mine they hope to create in the future.”
Dreyer believes it will take time for the local mining sector to fully realise the benefits of digital transformation, but says the company is already working to mainstream digitisation across its larger projects.