March 20198 IN MY V EWThe digital wave is currently sweeping mining and changing the way we do business. While this wave might seem to be breaking late, it is not to say that mining isn't innovative. In fact, mining is one of the most innovative industries in the world. You can't build a business at 4000 metres in the middle of Andes without a high level of ingenuity. Mining has deployed more autonomous vehicles than any other industry with over 200 CAT and Komatsu trucks driving around in the Pilbara, Western Australia. Exciting things are happening, but the public general's perception is that mining is a low-tech and labour-intensive practice. In its very basic form, mining is simple. A shovel, pick, bucket and a bunch of rocks and you can mine, as millions of artisanal miners do every day to eke out a living, in sometimes very dangerous conditions. Take the mining business to scale and it is one of the most complex industries in the world. Mines are massive, they are extremely capital intensive and what is being mined, the orebody, changes everday, if not every hour. While we have very sophisticated technologies to tell us where the rich veins of minerals lie, we do not have a clear line of site in extracting them. These richveins are also getting hard and harder to find.The scale of a mining operation cannot be underestimated. The footprint of the Roy Hill mine in Western Australia would cover greater metropolitan Brisbane (a city of 2million people), and the Chuquicamata mine in Chile swallowed, with permission, a town of 20,000. Mines too are often in very remote locations. In the middle of the Atacama Desert, high in the Andes, deep in the jungles of Laos and even in the Arctic Circle, miners go to where no man has gone before. They bring with them equipment, roads, and even cities that are needed to run a thriving mining operation.This scale, capital intensity and remoteness has perhaps made the adoption of digital technologies slower than in other industries. On average, it takes 15 years to adopt a new technology into the mining value chain, and miners have always been first to be second.But there is now a real imperative to change how we do things, and mining is being swept up in the digital transformation we are all experiencing. Along with the big macro trends, what is driving the digital imperative for mining is 3-fold.First, mining is facing more challenges than ever before. The minerals are getting harder to find, we need to dig deeper and ore grade is declining. This is layered with more complex regulation, environmental pressures and communities who are demanding more accountability. Next, miners have spent the last few years taking costs out of their operations, and no longer can head count be slashed. Mining operations today are lean and to be more productive miners must do things differently, and technology has to be the answer.Finally, as the miners have changed, so has the supply sector. Mining suppliers or the Mining Equipment, Technology and Services (METS) sector is highly sophisticated and is breaking new ground with world leading technologies in areas such as sensors, drones, real time monitoring, remote operations, simulation, digital twinning, robotics, automation and AI. Traditional truck and shovel companies are re-defining themselves as data analysts and we have seen the rise of a vibrant mining start-up community driven by hackathons and accelerators, which is delivering very sophisticated solutions to some of biggest miners' most pressing challenges. In fact in Australia, the METS sector generates over $90 billion annually in revenue, and employs more than 400,000 people, which is double the traditional mining workforce. Combined with mining, METS makes up about 12% of the Australian GDP, and when all the minerals are exhausted, will be the sustainable legacy of mining itself. Companies in the METS sector are doing some amazing things and are an important catalyst for the digital transformation which the mining industry is undergoing. BY CHRISTINE GIBBS STEWART, CEO, AUSTMINEMINING'S DIGITAL WAVE Christine Gibbs Stewart
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