Many leading mining companies are rallying behind the innovation imperative to deal with industry pressures, such as declining ore grades, rising costs and an increasingly militant and demanding labour force, says consulting company Deloitte.

The company says, in light of these realities, incremental improvement in companies is no longer enough, which explains why innovation has become the new key to survival.

This view is contained in Deloitte’s report entitled ‘Tracking the Trends 2015: The Top 10 Issues Mining Companies will Face this Year’.

At its most basic, innovation presents an optimal strategy for controlling costs. Companies that have invested in technologies such as remote mining, autonomous equipment and driverless trucks and trains have reduced expenses, while simultaneously driving up productivity.

It is becoming clear that innovation can do much more than reduce capital intensity. Approached strategically, innovation also has the power to reduce people and energy intensity, while increasing mining intensity.

Capturing the Learnings
Deloitte says the key is to think of innovation as much more than research and development around particular processes or technologies.

Companies can innovate in multiple ways, such as leveraging supplier knowledge around specific operational challenges, redefining their participation in the energy value chain or finding new ways to engage and partner with major stakeholders and constituencies.

To reap these rewards, mining companies must overcome their traditionally conservative tendencies. In many cases, miners struggle to adopt technologies that have been proven to work at other mining companies, let alone those from other industries. As a result, innovation becomes less of a technology problem and more of an adoption problem.

By breaking this mindset, mining companies can free themselves to adapt practical applications that already exist in other industries and apply them to fit their current needs.

For instance, the tunnel boring machines used by civil engineers for excavation can vastly reduce miners’ reliance on explosives. Until recently, these machines were too large to apply in a mining setting.
Some innovators, however, are now incorporating the underlying technology to build smaller machines – effectively adapting mature solutions from other industries to realise more rapid results.

Reimaging the Future
Innovation mandates companies to think in entirely new ways. For instance, traditionally, miners have focused on extracting higher grades and achieving faster throughput by optimising the pit schedule, product mix and logistics.

However, a truly innovative mindset will see them adopt an entirely new design paradigm that leverages new information, mining and energy technologies to maximise value.

Approached in this way, innovation can drive more than cost reduction. It can help mining companies mitigate and manage risks, strengthen business models and foster more effective community and government relations.

It can also help mining services companies enhance their value to the industry by developing new products and services. Longer term, it can even position organisations to deal better with endemic issues, such as corporate social responsibility, environmental performance and sustainability.

For decades, mining companies have understood the imperative to adopt technologies to accelerate automation and reduce fatalities.

That explains why leading companies continue to look at new technologies – such as nanomaterials, three-dimensional printing, modular design, robotics, bio- engineering and alternative haulage – to further improve operational performance.

By integrating mining, energy and information technology into mine and process design in an entirely innovative way, miners can achieve radical performance breakthroughs.

They can improve safety standards, save money, optimise their energy mix and vastly enhance operational performance.

However, to achieve these big breakthroughs, miners must articulate a bold vision of the future, one that hinges on achieving radical leaps rather than incremental shifts.