While the mining industry is steadily moving towards automation, it is comparatively slow in adopting new technology, with decision-makers still relying on basic tools that do not have the capability to holistically model complex mining value chains, says management consulting firm Datta Burton & Associates.

“There is clearly a need for effective, user-friendly decision support tools that guide operational and strategic decision-making,” the firm states.

Datta Burton & Associates explains that mining executives are faced with significant daily challenges in all areas of the business – from the strategic, including fluctuating commodity prices in a highly cyclical industry, to the tactical – dealing with operational and logistics issues caused by inhospitable and remote mining locations.

The company highlights that the risk inherent in South Africa’s decision-makers using conventional optimisation approaches in mining is that these methods reinforce “silo thinking” by focusing on operational constraints.

“In reality, most resources firms need to optimise across multiple operations, products and grades, and are faced with multiple moving constraints and nonlinear logistical constraints,” says Datta Burton & Associates lead partner Nikhil Datta.

Datta adds that the focus on productivity and cost initiatives using “silo thinking” prevents management teams from making strategic and higher-value decisions, as they are unable to analyse their businesses holistically.

“Historically, productivity and cost gains were easy to find, as they were deemed the ‘low hanging fruit’. But after a decade of productivity and cost initiatives, businesses now need to take a step back and take a more rigorous approach to uncovering value.”

Datta points out that another challenge mining companies face relates to their limited choice of decision support tools.

He says that the commonly used models tend to be either overly simplistic, such as Excel models and single-constraint-based value driver trees, or complex packages that require extensive data integration with supervisory control and data acquisition or a company’s operational systems.

“Many mines use both approaches, but these packages are unsuitable for complex value chains.”

He says this is because these systems have various limitations.

“Existing business intelligence tools are expensive and time-consuming to set up, expensive to reconfigure, and not very user friendly. Most importantly, they try to do too much without answering the key questions.”

Therefore, after identifying a clear gap in the industry for a “holistic optimisation model”, Datta Burton & Associates recently launched its dynamic constraints model (DCM) framework.