Recognising how connecting mineral resource knowledge to commodity markets leads to improved efficiency.
Anthony Finch,
Principal Mining Consultant,
Hitachi Consulting
Alex Atkins,
Manager, Risk Advisory,
Deloitte
Yoshinori Furuno,
General Manager,
Hitachi Construction Machinery Co., Ltd.
Dr. Glenn Callow,
Manager for Automation & Analytics Development,
Rio Tinto
The session took place in the Brisbane Room at Sofitel Wentworth between 1:45pm and 2:45pm on 1 December. The panel was chaired by Anthony Finch, Principal Mining Consultant for Hitachi Consulting and member of the Hitachi Global Mining Group.
The session kicked off with Anthony sharing his views on how connected mining can be used to increase miners’ profitability by becoming more agile and also how use of
technology to become agile will help to break the dreaded mining cycle that has been haunting the industry for hundreds of years. Anthony used analogies from the automotive industry to show how IoT and automation has transformed that industry in this way.
This was followed by Alex Atkins of Deloitte who provides mining subject matter expertise in the Audit and Risk and Financial Advisory service lines based on her 25+ years’ experience. Alex talked about her vision for technology to be translated to underground mining.
Yoshi Furuno, General Manager of the newly established Client Solution Business Development Division of Hitachi Construction Machinery, then took over to explain about the future of autonomous mining.
The final speaker was Dr. Glenn Callow of Rio Tinto. Glenn is currently Manager for Automation & Analytics Development in the Growth and Innovation business unit.
Glenn discussed the need to aggregate all the data sources at a mine-site in a dynamic and continuous way explaining that; “Data Warehouses and Data Lakes don’t by themselves fully exploit all the value of the data. We need systems that combine this data into information and models that cover the entire mining process. And we need this information and
these models to be generated automatically – the volume of data, and the time horizons we have to make a difference, require this. If you have these holistic models, and information views, then you can start to co-ordinate and control equipment – particularly autonomous equipment – with a consistency and fidelity that was not possible before.”
The session was concluded by a Q&A.
