However, in the age of big data, there is a growing movement to make data management an essential tool to optimise operations and provide valuable assistance to mine management.  

Brisbane based tech start-up Interlate director of strategy George McCullough told Australia’s Mining Monthly that data analytics, in its broadest sense, could provide mining companies opportunities to improve overall margin. 

“This can come in the form of increase production, reduced cost, improved use of equipment and a number of other contributors,” he said.

“What makes analytics a very attractive solution, is that uses assets [data] that companies already own to make these improvements. We’ve experienced typical improvements in overall economic value from processing plants of between 5%-10% and in some cases as much as 20% using sophisticated analytics.”

McCullough said analytics could reveal hidden value but understanding how to decode the signals was key and this could take time to learn.

He said for someone starting from scratch it could be an expensive undertaking. 

McCullough said the other benefit of utilising data strategically was that it could provide expert decision support.

“Running a mine is not easy because you have to get everything, including people with the right skill and experience, to where the mineral is located,” he said. 

“This can be particularly challenging when operating in a very remote area or developing countries. It becomes challenging and expensive to get the right people there and for some companies, they simply cannot afford the expatriation or labour costs to put an ‘A-team’ on every operation, for every roster and every shift. 

“This introduces the risk, which eventually manifests in production losses, unplanned stoppages and waste.”

Therefore it is essential, if a miner is focused on operational excellence, to have expert decision support on tap to help maintain consistency while striving for optimal output. 

The traditional approach is to use consultants but this can be expensive and the results are usually unsustainable. 

Also while, there are no shortage of monitoring systems on mines there are hundreds of alerting and alarm systems that feed information to operators continuously. 

“The goal of these systems is to help operators keep equipment running safely and continuously to maximise output,” McCullough said.

“However, this rapid incoming fire can be overwhelming to teams who are trying to keep the system running and also capture opportunities to improve. Often, striving to improve becomes a second priority as the urgency to keep operations going overrides everything and productivity begins to slip.”

There are many drivers of economic value in a mine and there are hundreds of variables that interact with each other surrounding these drivers.

For each mine they will be different as each operation has unique characteristics. However, the way they need to work together in a system to create economic value is well understood. 

“The amount of data that is generated by mining operations is staggering and it is easy for this data to simply get buried in a file system somewhere,” McCullough said.

“This is a common issue and so operations teams may know what they want to achieve but they don’t have access to the required data.

“They also might not have all the technical expertise in their teams. The key then to first get the data to flow and then get it to the experts.” 

Creating a network between the experts and the operations teams enables the data to flow. When this is in place specific drivers that will improve the economics of the mine can be targeted.

 McCullough said Interlate had also created a “productivity Guardian” that created a digital fingerprint of an improvement and then compares it to the data streaming from site. 

“If it detects that something is going wayward, it lets the right people know and tells them how to fix it,” he said. 

“This makes the improvements sustainable.”