The Digital Mine – eBook Review

Effective leveraging of data analytics key to developing the Digital Mine.

The recent eBook from Austmine, The Digital Mine, in part highlights the potential of harnessing unstructured data, machine data and using KPI’s to achieve operational efficiencies… just as Pulse Mining has been doing in close collaboration with our Mining Industry partners for the past couple of years with the development and roll-out of our Tactical Analytics Suite of products.

The leveraging of data analytics to improve mine performance and productivity is one of the key technological tools in the modern miner’s arsenal, for as mining technology counsultant, Kirby Johnson stated at Austmine Co-lab 16.2 – Performance Improvement Now (Newcastle, September 2016):

The ‘technology tsunami’ has already hit. You need only to look at driver-less drill rigs, trucks, trains and port operations. More technology-enabled change is on the way, in the form of artificial intelligence/cognitive, technical and operating excellence centres, data analytics, integrated operations, drones, advanced geological software, faster mine planning software, metal recovery simulation software, etc. A typical big mine site in Australia today has +300 Apps and is generating terrbytes of data per day.

The case-study cited in The Digital Mine eBook is impressive, however it is centred around a Canadian-based mining company operating a mine in Bulgaria, and as such has little relevance to the Australian industry, particularly as our statutory and regulatory environment are perhaps the toughest in the world, and our mines are already to a large degree automated and digitised… thus making achievement of significant productivity gains more difficult by several orders of magnitude.