This week, we are excited to celebrate 30 years of bringing innovation to the mining industry.
Join us as we reflect on our contributions of “firsts” with fond memories of mining technology from Surpac and Minex to ECSI, Gemcom Software, and now GEOVIA. As a Dassault Systèmes brand, we look forward to our continued journey at the forefront of mining innovation in the future. Throughout the week, we will feature highlights and memories from both our long-standing employees and executives. We encourage you to read and share your own memories of GEOVIA’s innovations. How have we helped you in the last 30 years? How can we help you in the years to come?
Yesterday, we heard from Dr. Tony Diering, Marni Rabasso, Gavin Low, Fiona Carew and Felix Walraven. Today, we are pleased to have reflections on the last 30 years of mining technology innovation from Ed Thornton our Mining Technical Customer Support Consultant and Dereck Prince, our Senior Technical Sales Consultant, and all-around Minex guru.
How did you feel being a part of the “generations” of innovation contributions to the mining industry? What excited you about being a part of the team and seeing the outcome from efforts of early R&D that transformed the industry?
In 1990, while working in the engineering office at a large open pit copper mine on Vancouver Island, BC (Canada) for BHP, we chose to use Gemcom software. As I was responsible for grade control and the surveyors, among other things, I liked the software because it ran on desktop PCs, was affordable, and we had quick access to the local development team, which was based in Vancouver. Before using the software, I would work long hours. Month end volume and grade calculations, which took many days to prepare and were approximations at best, could now be completed in half the time and were precise enough to be used to re-calibrate the mill throughput on a monthly basis. I could now develop a short term block model that was continually updated using the ore-control blasthole data so that the short term planners would be able to accurately predict the grades that were to be sent to the mill. While this sounds fairly mundane now – it made a big impact on productivity then and was impossible to do without having access to the software.
Ed Thornton, Technical Customer Support Consultant, Mining
Having spent my entire professional career working with Minex, I am proud that while there were only a few vendors writing software for the mining industry, our company offered the most comprehensive suite of products on the market. These included solutions for the geological modeling of stratified and disseminated orebodies; and short- and long-term mine design and scheduling for surface and underground stratified and disseminated deposits.
It was very gratifying to show clients how they could save weeks of work by using our software instead of continuing to carry out tasks by hand. Since our software modifications could be made literally overnight and a “fix” provided the next morning, we were able to be very responsive to our clients, which they appreciated. To this day, some mining companies could not carry out day-to-day functions without the use of our software tools.
Dereck Prince, Senior Technical Sales Consultant, GEOVIA
When it comes to Mining Innovation, what do you consider some of our “firsts”?
With regard to GEMS, while I may be biased, the development that we did to put everything into the database was a “first” and has been very successful.
Ed Thornton, Technical Customer Support Consultant, Mining
ECSI, the company that founded our Minex software, which was headed by the late Anthony Cram, was the first mining software company in the world in March of 1988 to adapt the Lerchs-Grossman optimum pit algorithm commonly used with block models in disseminated deposits to work with a gridded seam model for stratified deposits, such as coal. We were also the first mining software company in the world to use Artificial Intelligence in the correlation of lithologies, the correlation of coal seams, and the layout of underground mine workings.
Dereck Prince, Senior Technical Sales Consultant, GEOVIA
When you think about the future of Mining Innovation, what excites you? How will be being part of Dassault Systèmes help?
Dassault Systèmes provides a new vision and that brings with it a new sense of optimism and energy. The focus can shift to solving industry problems on a grander scale in this 21st century. Changing the focus from a narrow look at the mining industry to a wider angle view of the needs of the world will only be a good thing. I think that IF WE integrate data from multiple sources [ours and external products] so that it can be easily visualized in ways that we have not yet imagined will enhance the abilities of engineers, scientists and planners in their daily work.
Ed Thornton, Technical Customer Support Consultant, Mining
Dassault Systèmes holds the promise of us being able to revolutionize the mining software industry by making use of the vast amount of sophisticated technology that already exists in the company’s portfolio. Drawing upon the success of other Dassault Systèmes brands in other industries, we have the chance to truly change the face of mining, and provide customers with hitherto unprecedented increases in productivity and the ability to visualize the geological modeling and mine planning process in entirely new and innovative ways.
We have brought significant changes in the way geologists and engineers carry out their tasks with the technology of the day. The mining industry has been slow to embrace technology, and seeing how the adoption of Dassault Systèmes technology has changed the way other industries do business, the decades ahead should prove to be very exciting.
Dereck Prince, Senior Technical Sales Consultant, GEOVIA
Be sure to check back tomorrow as we share more highlights and “firsts” from our 30 years of innovation in mining. UPDATE: Part 3 and Part 4 are now online.
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