A new software program designed for the mining industry is using production data to help companies make strategic business decisions, improving efficiency and visibility.
Scio (pronounced “SEE-oh”), designed by Sudbury-based Centric Mining Systems, gathers performance data gleaned from mining operations, and then interprets the information to highlight any correlations it finds.
Centric founder and CEO Chris Novak said the program has been in the works for about a year. The mining industry is notorious for doing a terrible job at using data in an advantageous way, he said. The introduction of Scio aims to change that.
“The mining industry is really good at proactively using financial data, but always reactive in terms of looking at the actual activities going on around ore tracking,” Novak said.
Centric has, for years, been gathering data for companies for everything from tracking the movement of ore to generating production reconciliation reports. Scio is designed to operate in tandem with Centric, but can also be used on its own.
The idea behind using data to make business decisions — known as business intelligence — isn’t a new one. Companies have been using it for years, across industries, but information has typically been gathered piecemeal, turned into graphs and charts, and that’s where its efficacy ended, Novak said.
“They could create a pretty picture, but they really still didn’t understand the data they had,” he said.
Scio takes the interpretation of that data one step further by finding relationships amongst the numbers, which can be used by the companies to make strategic business decisions.
The system can examine, for example, the relationship between workforce size and safety, or production rates and environmental occurrences. It can demonstrate how well the company is producing, how well its resource models are performing, and how well it’s delivering product to the market.
It also connects seamlessly with Centric’s core product, which makes Scio stand out amongst its competitors.
“Because our core system is designed to house all these metrics — resource models, mining activities, consumables, drill and blast — it gives us the ability to make Scio smart and look at that data and automatically come up with scenarios that the business is going to get value from,” Novak said. “That is unique.”
In an industry that has been traditionally slow at responding to data, sometimes waiting days or weeks to release that information, this provides an instant snapshot of how the business is performing and how certain factors play into each other.
“The business is completely empowered instead of waiting to react and waiting for people to glue things together,” Novak said. “Our Centric product, with this new product, Scio, gives the decision-maker the ability to act immediately, rather than sit around and wait.”
It can also add a layer of visibility across the company. The information can be transmitted, for example, via television screen to workers in a meeting room, engineers in the bull pen, or executives in the boardroom, all in real time, Novak said.
By using data to make strategic production decisions, Novak believes companies can actually make incremental improvements that will enhance productivity by anywhere from 2 to 4 per cent. But Novak advises they shouldn’t just wait for a downturn in the industry before implementing this kind of performance analysis.
He favours a planned, proactive approach, rather than the “knee-jerk reaction” that’s typical of the industry. And a downturn can be an ideal period to implement data analysis since it can help a company tighten its belt when it’s most needed.
“When the markets are up, the mining industry does one thing: they just want to break more rock, because they know they can sell more product,” Novak said. “They almost become less efficient in the upmarket because they just want to break rock.”
Scio is being rolled out in stages. It was test piloted amongst a selection of Centric’s existing clients in early fall, and the company is extending it to a broader base of clients in November. Scio is scheduled for release to the rest of the market by the end of the year.
