That is the view of Dr Graeme Stanway, one of the authors of the latest Innovation: State of Play Biennial Mining Industry Update, which will be available for purchase from Australia’s Mining Monthly soon.
This survey had 800 respondents from around the world and of those, 60% were executives.
Besides the surveys Stanway and co-authors Paul Mahoney and Corinna Griebel – all three are from management consultancy VCI – also conducted about 40 drilldown interviews.
The Innovation: State of Play surveys started in 2012. This is the third such survey.
Stanway said this report confirmed a lot of the trends identified in the first two.
“Some of the technology trends have been really interesting,” Stanway said.
“From 2013 to this one there has been a huge increase in terms of sensing and data.
“But when people looked forward 15 years they saw the big impact shifting to artificial intelligence and the use of it.
“In this survey the robotics and automation focus had dropped off, showing there had been a bit of a false dawn on that. But if we looked forward 15 years we saw it becoming a big thing again.”
Stanway said one of the benefits of automation and robotics was the accuracy of data generated.
This data can be fed into a host of predictive analytics to help improve uptime of equipment and productivity in general.
Stanway said automation also led to change management issues and skills development.
“The thing about skills is it wasn’t about development or creating them,” he said.
“The world will be awash with them.
“The issue will be attracting them into mining.
“They have to see this as a smart industry. It will be more a case of attracting impressive people into mining.”
Stanway said middle managers were the biggest challenge to change management.
He said middle managers had control over large numbers of people and could see things such as automation as a threat to their roles and would become blockers of such changes.
“The people on the shop floor are not really blockers because their lives will get better,” Stanway said.
India is a major focus of this report.
“We did a major drill down on India in this report,” Stanway said.
“India has a big issue dealing with communities and the environment.
“It is a big emerging market. It has a lot of mineral resources but little exploration of them.
“They have a big drive to close that opportunity gap.
“The third thing is they have a hugely successful technology industry but that hasn’t made its way into mining.”
In some ways India is quite similar to the US. Silicon Valley is only just starting to make inroads into the mining space.
“In South Africa and Australia the industry is concerned about technology displacing people. In India they want to disrupt.”
For the mining, equipment, technology and services sector Stanway believes diversification is the key.
“The thing I think is unexploited in Australia is the leverage of the METS capability into other industries,” he said.
“There is a preference for mining agnostic companies. Miners prefer to buy from companies not driven by mining because they feel they innovate quicker.”
Also, diversification provides something of a hedge against the inevitable downturns that blight the industry.
Key sponsors of the Innovation: State of Play report are the University of Western Australia and METS Ignited.
