Ahead of our GEOVIA User Conference in Kolkata, India on 5 October, we spoke to Tanuj Mittal, GEOVIA Brand Head in India at Dassault Systèmes, on the main issues that are affecting the Indian mining industry today and how technology can help.
What are the main issues facing the Indian mining industry today?
India is amongst the top 10 global producers of many commodities, in particular coal, iron ore, chromite and bauxite.
The cost and efficiency at which we produce is still not among the best in the world. Some specific challenges on a site by site basis include an inability to adapt to changing external factors, resulting in variance between plan and production. Furthermore, plans are often not applicable in the field because there is a gap in data, communication, and silos between the field and planning person.
Another issue that mines are facing in India as well as many other developing countries is a lack of integration across the mining value chain (design, simulation, scheduling, execution). Additionally, decision making can be improved by making latest information available in real time. Currently, mines in the country are largely manual, preventing us from fully visualising what is happening in our mine, meaning that miners are unable to quickly react to things that are happening in the field and feed this back to headquarters. And last but most importantly, ensuring a standard of safety on mines.
How can technology help to address these challenges?
The difficulties in ensuring that actual mining corresponds to the planning process can be addressed with better collaboration practices, but more specifically digitizing mining processes to help our customers become more efficient.
For instance, using the cloud and a single platform to facilitate collaboration, particularly connecting the strategic mine planners with the short and medium term planners in the field. If stakeholders are able to share their information in a central location and update data in real time, this will go a long way in ensuring strategic and tactical planners are on the same page.
Part of the GEOVIA suite is also Surpac 6.9, which will be released soon with structural suite. This will help to control the Geotechnical aspects of mines which in actual can help to understand the slope failure.
At Dassault Systèmes, we are bringing knowledge and best practices from different industries such as manufacturing, automotive, aeronautics, which have already adopted a collaborative platform. This type of platform can help mining companies digitise their operations and address these abovementioned issues.
These issues and their solutions are some of the topics that we will discuss at our upcoming user conference in Kolkata, India.
It is an important event for us and provides us with the chance to meet with our partners and customers to showcase what we are doing in terms of disruptive technology. We also look forward to presenting our product updates and how they can help mine planners and geologists become more efficient at their job.
More information and to register for the conference
For more on collaboration, watch our interview with GEOVIA CEO Raoul Jacquand on purposeful collaboration.
