Mining has always been a high-demand sector. It’s becoming increasingly challenging, as a result of complex and stringent third-party approvals, health, safety and environmental regulations, and market demands to be increasingly responsive and competitive.
Then there’s the massive transformation underway to decarbonise mining, which is a pressing priority in 2024.
These wide-ranging and ever changing priorities and challenges represent much more than mere cost-of-business issues for mining businesses. In order to manage these arising challenges, mine operators often find themselves introducing slow and cumbersome business processes on a piece-meal basis.
Today, this is forcing mine operators to an inflection point, where inefficiencies such as “swivel chairing” between a multitude of systems for business processes and relying on filled-in paper forms that need data entry afterwards, is no longer sustainable or acceptable.
Justin Grose, Appian’s account director of Resources & Energy, makes it clear that it’s not necessary to run MineOps in a manual and disjunct fashion. All business information that is captured needs to be accessible where it’s needed, and in real time.
“Being able to surface information, push and pull or update it in real time, provide access to that data, no matter where it resides within the organisation, is the problem that Appian solves with its proprietary data fabric capability” Grose said.
Appian’s data fabric capability can provide a single and unified, 360-degree view of mining operations. Not only that, it uses the information surfaced to automate business processes.
With data fabric, Appian’s Platform allows organisations to seamlessly connect and unify information to take action, in real time. That’s opposed to lifting, shifting, or ingesting, which, as Grose explains, when you start to do that, it’ll lead to some form of data loss and lack of control which can lead to chaos.
Appian’s Platform also offers private artificial intelligence (AI), for greater insights. Private, because it’s safer to keep sensitive business data separated from public AI platforms, ensuring access controls for it.
In essence, Appian’s data fabric creates a much-needed agility layer for mine operators, which also provides greater flexibility. Grose said it enables a responsive operation, which takes the pressure off these businesses and allows them to more seamlessly meet their various obligations.
“Information is available in real-time, and not in weeks when processing tasks per traditional methods,” Grose said.
“The immediacy of data availability lets mining organisations respond quickly to evolving regulations, and policies, customer requirements – and, it makes Environmental, Sustainability and Governance (ESG) reporting that much quicker and far more detailed,” he added.
“In today’s business landscape, regulators and investors in the mining sector require this level of speed, accuracy and efficiency, along with the mining operators for their own internal business needs,” Grose said.
Traditionally, configuring an application or system that meets regulator, investor and mining business requirements would’ve been a long process, possibly resulting in multi-year implementations.
This is not the case with Appian. Not only is the Appian Platform fast and responsive, the implementation of it is too.
“We’d rather prove the value, deliver financial savings and return on investment to our clients quickly,” Grose said.
Appian’s eight week guarantee for an organisation’s first implementation ensures the time to deploy a minimum viable product (MVP) takes no longer than that. Within weeks, rather than spending money over years, Appian clients will have a production ready application running within the mining organisation.
“It’s a low-code platform approach that delivers this speed and flexibility. Depending on the legacy of the information sources, we could also deploy AI robots to fetch the data to bring it into the Appian system,” Grose said.
“It’s a drag-and-drop of different connected objects, so the analogy is a bit like building a Lego model with components that can then be used to increase the velocity of new projects,” Grose added.
Appian has been able to speed up its delivery of solutions by reimagining what it has already created for applications in other organisations.
That is at the centre of Appian’s approach: to be efficient and effective, removing bottlenecks in organisations’ business processes while extracting more value out of them.
“Think of it as digging far deeper into your information mine while having what’s retrieved automagically sorted and analysed to provide deeper insights than what’s been possible before,” Grose concluded.
Learn more about how Appian can support the Mining sector HERE.