By Dirk Claasens, IBM Vice President for Industrial Products , presents a point of view of the South African Mining Industry at Mining Indaba 2015.
The industry of mining is by its nature highly exposed to risk. Its asset intensity, commodity price dependence and health safety and security (HSE) profile demand predictability. So it seems perfectly understandable that productivity has become the mantra for the mining industry. The typical response to market volatility are austerity and capital investment cuts, but nothing more than a short term cash improvement. Urgent and sustainable productivity gains are important but responsiveness to volatile market demand is even more important. It’s called agility. Technologies pave the way to adopt a mine- on- demand supply chain design. Mine to order is
the big picture approach to gaining optionality in mine design and scheduling driven by the
power of big data and analytics. It’s the non-intrusive breakthrough the industry needs to be
agile and thrive. Not just survive.
What Are The Drone Anti-jamming Systems Technology?
Indaba 2015 - IBM mining on demand
1. "Mining on Demand"
How Information Technology Can Transform the Mining Industry
Dirk Claessens
Vice President, Metals & Mining, IBM
Capetown, February 2015
2. With the end of the commodity supercycle behind
us, the mining industry has taken its initial
productivity measures.
More is required, the mining industry is in need of
agility & visibility.
Current technology facilitates this objective.
We call it « Mine-on-Demand ».
2
4. DEMANDSUPPLY
Current Status: Lack of Optionality & Integration kills Agility
& Visibility
4
Establish
Sell &
Distribute
Exploit Beneficiate
Lack of
optionality in
the design and
planning
phase
Lack of
optimization
and optionality
in scheduling
phase
Discover Rehabilitate
5. • POC at a platinum producer
demonstrated an 8 week current
process reduced to minutes
• Multiple realistic design scenarios
can be created for immediate
evaluation and optimization
• Leverage descriptive, spatial
visualization to inspect, analyse and
animate each scenario to verify
feasibility – with the ability to share
options over the web
Outcomes & Benefits
OPTIONALITY IN DESIGN OPTIONALITY IN SCHEDULING
MINE-ON-
DEMAND
The Solution : Optionality in Mine Design and Scheduling
• Baseline, Unconstrained and
Constrained Scenario Building
• Optimized schedules for multiple
business factors and constraints, e.g:
Outcomes & Benefits
• Shaft hoisting
capacity
• Reef Density
• Tramming capacity • Waste Density
• # Panels per raise
line
• Commodity Price
Forecasts
• # Raise lines per
half level
• Exchange Rates &
Inflation Forecasts
• Extraction %
6. DEMANDSUPPLY
Current Status: Lack of Optionality & Integration Kills Agility
& Visibility
6
Establish
Sell &
Distribute
Exploit Beneficiate
No mineral asset
visibility as
inventory on an
enterprise level
Discover Rehabilitate
7. EnterpriseSystems
MiningAssetSystems
The Solution : Enterprise Visibility Of The Mineral Asset
Copyright, MineRP 2014
Translate to
Inventory
Maintain Inventory
Understand
Mineral Asset
On Demand, auditable, traceable Mineral Asset
Management
•Continuous control of Mineral Asset status, at
any level of granularity
•Exposure of data sources for analysis, by
analytics tools
•Mineral Asset knowledge founded upon fully
auditable/traceable mining technical
information
•Commercially advised mining decisions and
mining-advised commercial decisions
•Standardised , integrated information
framework spanning the whole value chain.
Outcomes & Benefits
ORE RESERVE ENTERPRISE
INTEGRATION
8. DEMAND
SUPPLY
End-to-end Integration will drive Agility and Visibility
8
Establish
Sell &
Distribute
Exploit Beneficiate
« Sell what you have and then mine what you sold. »
9. 9
Conclusion. …On Demand Mining,
providing the Agility and Transparency
required can be delivered today.
Come and visit IBM and MineRP’s stand so we can explain..
Hinweis der Redaktion
You do not know what you have to sell. You need to sell what you have, and then mine what you sell.
The information is dispersed across a vast array of mining technical systems and you cannot consistently consolidate what you have as a mineral asset inventory.
So you are stuck to live with a static mine plan and design (which stays fixed for a year or more), geared towards a fixed cut-off grade, based upon economic/demand assumptions.
Also, there is not transparent , visible asset information, on an enterprise level which can be traced back into the mine operation level, at various levels of granularity.
There are in fact two legs to the problem of lack of optionality:
- You need to be able to generate dynamically a mine design and plan , in minutes, not months, initially to play around with various economic and mine variability scenarios.
And then when as you have your plans ready, optimize the operation sequence, (in an hour, not months) – and importantly change this optimized plan dynamically as the reality changes around you.
This allows you to deal with variability in terms of actual grade, rock characteristics, structural problems, power availability etc. and then respond appropriately, whith a new updated plan an optimized operations sequence.
The old approach has been: give me your plan and constraines, and I will optimize the operational activity sequence.
This is static and does not allow you to respond to demand as it happens.
The new approach is give me your demand, I will plan and optimze, and change my plan and optimization as demand changes.
So when you have both optionality in design/plan and scheduling, you become responsive to the market demand, in true Mine-On-Demand fashion.
Which will by the way also contain your maintenance, service and engineering activyt as part of one optimized schedule, not as a delay which simply hits you where you do not even are aware of the economic impact. One Master Business Schedule.
This has been piloted at a major platinum producer her in South-Africa.
The second issue with the array of MTS and enterprise/operation breakpoint is that you do not have mineral assets which can be audited and traced back to its origin from an enterprise level.
Asset = Resource plus Reserve (once you apply capital).
Step One is to Index the Space: Creating a single Spatial Catalogue across all Mining Technical Info (Systems) on classification of resources and reserves.
Step Two is to understand, update/enrich the spatial catalogue of mining technical info , as updates happen,
Step Three is building the bridge between operation and inventory: a translation to some level of granularity in the enterprise system with full traceability back into the operation.
Step Four is maintaining the inventory as and when transactions happen, both from a demand fulfilment side, as well as from the inventory replenishment side when updates happen on the mineral asset side. Scenarios Video