Michael Wortley, (Global Manager – PRO Products, Australia), Kai Riihioja (Senior Software Engineer, Australia), Jose Luis Bravo (Senior Instrument Engineer, Chile) and Rodrigo Sales (Senior Product Engineer, Brazil), all of Metso, are nominated for the SmartTag. The SmartTag is nominated in the Underground Production category because of its great potential in tracking ore in caving applications. However, it also has myriad applications in surface mining (particularly in managing fragmentation) and plant operation.

At Kittilä mine in Finland, Metso SmartTags and in-house expertise have been used to develop a system that continuously and accurately links geotechnical and lab data from the mine to the performance of the plant. The system has led to improvements in Kittilä’s reconciliation and metallurgical accounting and provides a method to predict head grades, in real time, without the need to wait for plant assay results. The system also allows the geology department to warn the plant about problematic ore types before they cause processing issues.