4 minute read
Everything is data; every company is a data company
The MICA team moderated a panel on “Digitalization in Mining – Navigating the landscape and glancing at the future” at the Digitalization in Mining North America Conference in Toronto this past summer.
By Charles Chamirai Nyabeze, VP Business Development and Commercialization, Centre for Excellence in Mining Innovation
From August 30 to september 1, 2022, the MiCA team attended the Digitalization in Mining North America Conference in Toronto (#DMNA22), the event organized by the Mining innovation Network. The Centre for excellence in Mining innovation’s Mining innovation Commercialization Accelerator (MiCA) team participated in the roles of moderators, chairperson, and speaker in panel discussions. They moderated a panel on “Digitalization in Mining – Navigating the landscape and glancing at the future”, chaired the session on “Robotics & Automation in Mining Track”, and were a moderator and a member of the panel discussion on “exploring how diversity in mining will drive long-term innovation” and on “The importance of strategic partnerships for the regional and global mining industry”.
The conference focused on shaping a better mining industry future through digital transformation that will enable data-driven decision making. The meeting identified that it is people who drive the business; digitally capable people will form digitally literate organizations, thus developing a digitally competent workforce is vital in laying the foundation for the future of mining. Digitalization will improve productivity but, just as significantly, it will also aid the industry in becoming safer, removing people from harm’s way. Digitalization will allow for the more reliable deployment of labour.
The mining industry will enable digitalization by creating the basic infrastructure necessary to introduce digital tools. Organizations must challenge themselves to measure their ability to support digitization; this requires looking at the organization’s communications and data capacity to enable digital transformation. Further on adopting digitization initiatives, organizations must put sustainment plans for the proposed technology to support the continuity of operations after introducing that solution.
The purpose of daTa
The purpose of data is to 1) run operations, 2) ensure operational compliance, and 3) support decision-making. some interesting facts about data utilization are that 90 per cent of company-collected data is unused, and data-gathering and managing expenses make up to 90 per cent of most companies’ expenditures.
CompeTiTive advanTage
To secure a competitive advantage, companies have to treat data as an asset and ensure the integrity of the bits and bytes that contribute to creating data and actionable information. Organizations must realize that unreliable, unstructured data (a liability) is the first cause of a company’s wrong decisions. Collecting redundant data is just an act of wasting money.
daTa CulTure
Creating a data-driven culture within the context of a digitally literate organization will require an end-to-end optimization that spans the whole value chain.
easy access through organizationwide data-sharing philosophy and data-sharing specifications will ensure maximum utilization of collected data. This will be made easier by the development
of new data management tools. some of these tools will be sitespecific, require custom creation, and connectivity across the entire mining value chain. Digital transformation will create an environment that will encourage diverse and new ways to run mining operations, resulting in new companies and job creation.
Real-time data analysis in a mixed fleet environment allows for time synchronization of operation-wide events, which drives timely insights that would have been impossible without this level of sensor fusion and soft-sensor fusion. Time synchronization also unlocks the actual value of digitalization as correlated events management will unlock value resulting in real-time operational controls.
Digitalization will transform the whole mining value chain to improve the following areas:
• safety
• Production
• Profit/ROi/NPV
• environmental/esG
in alignment with the MiCA Network, a key takeaway from this conference was that it takes an ecosystem of vendors to solve the mining industry’s challenges. The commoditization of innovation will accelerate digitalization. it takes an ecosystem (innovation collective) of trusted vendors to address the mining industry’s challenges.
For more information on the MiCA Network and to learn how to become a member, please visit www.micanetwork.ca.
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