Smart Mining: How the Metals & Mining Industry Can Strike Operational Gold with Data Analytics

mining

Besides the common process issues that nearly all industrial manufacturing companies face, if you’re within the Metals & Mining industry, you’re probably facing your own set of unique challenges. These include access to critical resources like energy and water and increasing complex ore bodies and declining ore grades. Not to mention the increasingly complicated processes and difficulty in finding and retaining skilled labor. What’s needed is a more efficient approach to improve your day-to-day operations while also addressing the obstacles you may be facing. 

Luckily, the rise of Industry 4.0 (heard of it?) and user-friendly self-service analytics are making Smart Mining much much easier allowing the Metals & Mining industry to strike operational gold.

So What Exactly *is* Self-Service Analytics?

Maybe you already know what it is; maybe you’ve heard about it but need some clarity. Or maybe you’ve neeeever heard of it and have no idea what we’re talking about. This short 2 minute video by our very own Customer Success Manager, Nick Petrosyan, will sum it up for you:

Fully Leverage Your Data 

The key to it all is simple: you need to fully leverage your data to gain crucial insights into your processes. TrendMiner allows plant managers and process experts to easily do analytics, so they can monitor, analyze, and predict processes themselves without the help of data scientists. As a plug and play tool, process experts can easily and directly monitor processes and quickly solve problems. Additionally, it allows for asset monitoring to increase reliability and predicative maintenance to reduce down time. Another substantial benefit is that it eliminates the many data silos that exist within an organization and within operations as it provides a central source of process information and a central process overview through operational dashboards.

Now, let’s talk about issues concerning recruiting specialized personnel for remote mine locations? Is this a problem you are facing? No worries. Now process specialists, especially plant managers, can use self-service analytics to monitor processes and solve problems from wherever they are, without being on-site. TrendMiner is essentially “the eyes of the operation” and provides 24/7 support for the team.

And given the extreme environment of Metals & Mining, communication on and off site can be challenging. With TrendMiner, this issue is solved. It allows for the input of operational contextual data, so all of your process experts can be kept up to date on what is happening in the mine or plant. And plant managers, you’ll love this: it also has the capability to generate automatic reports, which saves a lot of time. Ultimately, our software provides a holistic view of the whole process serving as a single source of process information.

Putting It to Use:

There are many different use cases of how you can use TrendMiner self-service analytics to optimize your processes. Here are a few:

  • Root cause analysis.
  • Energy consumption monitoring.
  • Process efficiency monitoring.
  • Soft sensoring.
  • Data pre-processing for APC export.
  • Creation of production reports with KPI’s for handovers to management and shifts.

For an in-depth look at what TrendMiner can do for your processes, download our free Key Capabilities Whitepaper >

Get m(ORE) Out of the Data You Already Have

(Sorry, just couldn’t help it!) A solution like TrendMiner’s self-service analytics platform really will help you get more metal and mineral out of less ore and get more efficiency out of using less energy and water. You can gain more understanding and insight into your processes by getting fast answers to your root cause analyses. You’ll also be able to monitor your assets and predict maintenance for increased equipment life. With this and more, what you get is easy next generation Smart Mining.

Now You Can See TrendMiner in Action! 

To better understand how TrendMiner can help you to fully leverage your data and improve operations, watch our webinar: Advance Analytics for the Metals & Mining Industry

You’ll be given an overview of TrendMiner and a first-hand look at how you can use it in your operations. You’ll see how to use our software to determine the root cause of hydrometallurgical extraction process anomalies to increase metal recovery rates and reduce downtime with optimized conveyor belt energy and predict maintenance.