With the assistance of global infrastructure software solutions provider Bentley Systems, a global diversified mining major with operations in South Africa has embarked on a project that will be a stepping stone in actualising its vision for fully automated and remote mining operations.

To exploit the miner’s three-dimensional (3D) spatial information, it started implementing the Geospatial Integration Project in July 2012, designed by Bentley to build an integrated geographic information system (GIS) to provide a single management platform for the miner’s geospatial data, workflows and reports.

A spokesperson for the mining group highlights that the problem with larger corporations, especially those with diverse information sets, is understanding what data is available, how that data is managed and how it is integrated.

The spokesperson highlights the importance of tools that help large corporations manage and consolidate their data, which is essential when it comes to key decision-making processes. “If that amount of information remains unmanaged and isn’t easily verifiable or consolidated in a way that makes sense, then your decisions based on that data are likely to be poor,” he explains.

Bentley Systems industry sales manager for the African mining sector Anina van der Westhuizen agrees, pointing to the historic trend in many modern corporations to silo information, which creates disparity among the different disciplines within an organisation.

“Bentley’s solutions allow for various disciplines to readily share information in a managed environment, making diverse sets of information available to analyse in order to make informed and insightful decisions,” she says.

Van der Westhuizen tells Mining Weekly that Bentley recognises the need for organisations to standardise the information they create and to be able to manage it in a secure environment and make it available within the organisation. Recognising this, Bentley decided to apply its infrastructure software solutions accordingly.

The mining major lauds Bentley’s solution, which, according to the spokesperson, lends itself to supporting key business processes by effectively managing and integrating data. “At the end of the day, any technology should be supporting your business, rather than the business existing to support the technology.”

He tells Mining Weekly that when the mining group initiated the roll-out of the project last year, it started with “small and discrete” areas of business, including the survey, geoscience, environmental and technology departments within corporate head office.

“Much of our data that needed to be managed was spatial, and 3D. “We, therefore, looked carefully at first establishing a foundation, or platform, looking at the solutions available, identifying the best fit and then, slowly, taking small sections of data to kickoff the project,” he says.

Each business unit started capturing data relevant to their work within the system, using management features that were never available before and getting immediate value in terms of knowing that their data was being properly structured and managed.

The mining major leveraged the benefit of linking the diverse data sets, which all relate to similar spatial contexts and can be viewed and portrayed as a single consolidated set of data.

“Each of the business areas got to know how the system operates, and we worked with them to understand what it is they needed to take responsibility for and the data they would be capturing,” says the spokesperson.

He further explains that, once the process is complete, the company will have data sets from different areas of the business, which the mining corporation will bring together for a more holistic approach to decision-making, revealing the value within each business area.

“This has started to reveal the bigger picture: that we now have a richness of data, which was very difficult to achieve before. “Now that the different data sets – which each relate to one area within the business – are consolidated in a single, managed environment, we can starting making more informed decisions.”

Benefits of Bentley’s Solution

Van der Westhuizen says that, in an organisation like a major mining corporation, where so many disciplines need to buy into the solution, change management can be a challenge. However, in this solution the change is limited due to the consolidation of infor- mation in the background and the significant value-add to users throughout the organisation.

So far, buy-in at the corporation has been positive, with other business units within the corporation that want to come on board. The miner tells Mining Weekly that these will be assimilated over time, possibly in the next two or three years.

Bentley Systems local channel partner iGlobe solutions director Stanley du Toit, who was instrumental in rolling out the Geospatial Integration Project at the mine, adds that one of the primary benefits of Bentley’s solution, and one that is making it more attractive to clients, is that it can be rolled out tier by tier as a scalable solution.

“Companies might want to start off with the data-capturing side, after which they can add the next building block. Moreover, the solution has been developed with such an open architecture, that it can feed into neighbouring departments, without them having to recreate the wheel. “They can also add options to the solution over time,” says Du Toit.

Moreover, Van der Westhuizen emphasises that the objective for deploying one or all of the different modules of this scalable solution is different for each company.

“At the end of the day it is to provide the right information to the right person at the right time. “Information is captured directly into a secure data source with Bentley Map and published to the relevant individuals within the organisation through Bentley Geo Web Publisher, which ensures that the necessary security meas-ures are enforced,” she says.

Award-Winning Applications

Two other mining projects that have been implementing Bentley Systems’ applications were recognised last year at Bentley Systems’ Be Inspired awards, which acknowledge “extraordinary infra- structure projects” currently under way.

South Africa-focused diamond producer Petra Diamonds’ Finsch mine, in Lime Acres, Northern Cape, has implemented a GIS project, which was awarded top honours in the Innovation in Mining and Metals category, while iron-ore major Kumba Iron Ore’s Kolomela mine, in Postmasburg, Northern Cape, was recognised as a finalist in the same category for its environmental monitoring data management system.

For the past eight years, Petra Diamonds has been developing an integrated solution to manage geospatial data for five departments that were initially functioning in isolation.

Moreover, the solution, which started with Survey, Land Management and Environmental spatial information, evolved over time to include the management of the local mining village, Lime Acres. The solution, therefore, covers everything from the allocation of a ‘categorised’ mining house, an employee with a unique ID in a human resources database and the monthly distribution of water and electricity bills. The GIS project has linked spatial data and information scattered in various databases.

Meanwhile, Kumba Iron Ore has developed an integrated environmental monitoring solution for Kolomela, which saves time by providing a one-stop-shop for the environmental monitoring of data on water, dust, and biodiversity, among other data sets.

The project uses a handheld unit allowing field data to be captured and automatically downloaded when the unit is docked, eliminating human error during transfer. As Kolomela is a fairly new mine, the solution also allows for survey information to be shared dynamically with the environmental department as the mine is developed to obtain real-time rehabilitation information.