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?
In Part 1, we heard from Dr. Tony Diering, Marni Rabasso, Gavin Low, Fiona Carew and Felix Walraven. Part 2 featured 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. Today, we are pleased to share thoughts from Steve Carter, our Chief Technology Officer, whose career in mining software spans nearly 30 years.
Reflecting on your 27 years with the company, what moments in mining innovation are most exciting?
Although I began my mining career in sales, I was very fortunate to quickly move to R&D where I could add new features to the software, originally focusing on surveying, and then moving to engineering design for underground and open cut mines. In the early 90’s, I was approached to lead a 4-person team to rewrite Surpac as a modern 32-bit application to run on MS-DOS, Microsoft Windows and a wide range of UNIX workstations, which we delivered to the market in 1991. Six months later, we delivered Surpac 2 V1.O-F, to which the marketing responded positively to our shiny new product. It was at this moment, that I realized the light was shining onto our software and the company
Each new release of Surpac featured progressive improvements resulting with growth in market share in a growing market, growth in profits, and growth in staff numbers. Surpac earned its reputation as the easiest mining software product to learn, and the most adaptable software product in its market sector. The extensibility and adaptability of the product, to make it go places that we had never dreamed, required its sophisticated macro system. Putting this power into the hands of a very inventive user community delivered surprise after surprise, and still does.
One highlight for me was in 1995, when one of Canada’s largest oil sands miner, opened a tender to providers of mine planning software to replace their current system. Up until then, Surpac’s greatest successes were with smaller mining companies, largely because of the product’s heritage of limitations with the data set sizes it could handle. While we knew the process would be challenging, we decided to submit a bid. In the end, it came down to two software providers, and Surpac was selected. As a result, we enhanced our software to include numerous features and capabilities, including a network license management system, which is still in use today, albeit significantly evolved, by Surpac, GEMS, Minex, Whittle and MineSched. The success of this installation had a profound impact on our self-belief and success continued with growth in revenue, profit and staff numbers in the coming years.
In 1997, we began a 4 year project to evolve Surpac and replace all of the FORTRAN code with C by completing an automated language conversion project so that we only had to deal with the complexities of a single programming language. This was completed successfully and has contributed to the ongoing success of the Surpac product. In mid-2000, Surpac Vision V4.0 was released. This is essentially the same Surpac that people still use today, and with many other improvements, perhaps most notably the Data Plugins, set a new benchmark in the ease of working with foreign data formats. The next generation TCL-based scripting engine, recently introduced, did an even better job of reinforcing the power, extensibility and adaptability of Surpac.
These are just a few highlights from my time with Surpac, Gemcom and Dassault Systèmes. The journey hasn’t ended – just this little part of the story. As all of us know, the journey continues and I am very excited to see where the future of mining innovation will go.
Steve Carter, Chief Technology Officer, GEOVIA
Be sure to check back tomorrow as we share more highlights and “firsts” from our 30 years of innovation in mining. UPDATE: Part 4 is now online.
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