Mining industry: 5 steps to implement digital transformation

Digital transformation in the mining industry is a phenomenon of great impact for the sector since it is highly exposed to risk and many companies need to improve their processes precisely to reduce the risk of physical work and the stress of manual and repetitive tasks.

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The main risk of the mining industry is productivity, since reducing costs is not enough to successfully overcome this challenge. For this reason, it is essential to implement digital tools to improve productivity and business results.

In this sense, the keys to reducing exposure to risk are the lack of visibility, tracking, measurement, and access to data in real-time from industrial operations. But these changes or improvements would not be possible without the intervention of technological solutions that make the minimization of these risks evident.

Assuming that it is an expensive investment for a mining company is a prejudice of many traditional companies that prefer to invest efforts and time than investing a small amount of money to reduce both and not have to worry in the future about the efficiency and productivity of the processes.

But beyond the fact that it involves the entire company in its extension, it is the responsibility of the direction and management to find a way to implement the digital transformation in the mining industry in a strategic way to avoid risks.

As we know, more by statistics than by intuition, that the digital transformation in the mining industry will be adopted by all companies in the sector in a few years, it is time to anticipate it by explaining the main steps to achieve it.

1. Identify the goals of the transformation.

The digital user experience is important, but it is only part of the implementation process. While the commercial results of digitization can also be understood as an important objective. What is your mining company looking for when deciding to implement digital transformation? Greater productivity, innovation, be more competitive, be more profitable?

To help you answer these questions that properly define your digital transformation goals in the mining industry, consider these aspects:

• Increasing productivity and billing.
• Integration with existing systems and stakeholders in the supply chain.
• Reducing the complexity of risk management and preventive control
• Generating a vision or panorama of the company's needs with data analytics allows for improving decisions and increasing productivity.

2. Investigate the innovations available in the market.

Technological innovation in industrial operations includes intelligent automation, human-machine collaboration, IoT, and cybersecurity. In addition, the cloud is embracing new concepts such as hybrid IT and fog computing in mining. These new disruptive technologies are laying the foundations for a new digital ecosystem of on-demand service platforms for companies.

3. Focus on long-term needs.

From the perspective of the structure and design of these systems, these innovations will allow you to build a highly virtual and distributed technological ecosystem of on-demand services. The right combination of these tools is what will help you achieve the productivity improvement goals outlined at the beginning of this list.

4. Mastering the life cycle of digital services.

Once the tools to implement the digital transformation in risk management have been incorporated, you must design the life cycle of these technological solutions in your company. Carrying out this process implies integrating the development, implementation, management, and evolution of these technologies in the coming years.

5. Reorganize the company for a gradual digital transformation.

The digital transformation in the mining industry will allow solutions from different providers to be integrated into a single platform. The stakeholders of the company will be able to use these tools according to their specific needs and the results they seek. Organizations must begin this change while operating with their existing infrastructure.

This means that some old and new elements of technology ecosystems will need to co-exist for a while. In this sense, it is not necessary to create new processes to implement the strategy. However, as we said before, digital transformation involves the entire organization.

Therefore, coordination between the different areas is key so that the execution of the project progresses organically from the technical point of view and, above all, from the business plan designed by the company.

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Conclusion.

In conclusion, although mining companies do not spare resources to incorporate technologies, oriented to plant control systems, that is, production machinery to work the raw material, the truth is that they remain somewhat reticent regarding the implementation of digital process automation tools.

This is due, in part, to the fact that in many cases their expectations with digital technologies were not met, but more than anything due to ignorance of the tool itself than due to a failure of the software itself. Sometimes with technology, it is not enough if what is needed is human expertise to give the execution orders corresponding to the digital ecosystem.

Hence, the impossibility of a successful implementation, in these cases, produced a feeling of mistrust towards the digital transformation in the mining industry, without understanding that it is not a technical failure of the technology, but a human tactical failure, which would fall on the costs of the company.

In short, postponing the digital transformation in the mining industry indefinitely means getting used to industrial risks, but also exposing yourself to the competitive and financial risk of failing to comply with environmental and legal regulations and the objectives for commercial purposes of maintaining productive capacity.

That is why you must, in addition to worrying about renewing physical machinery, choose and hire the best digital technology that suits your needs for continuous improvement, making conscious, responsible, and efficient use of this valuable resource.