RPMGlobal Holdings says it plans on releasing before the end of the year an innovative enterprise Intelligent mine Design (ID) solution, which will be fully integrated within RPM’s Intelligent Mining (IM) suite of products.
RPM’s CEO and Managing Director, Richard Mathews, said: “A lot of the products currently available in the market are based upon 30-year-old principles and the same underlying code base which has been adapted, reformed, tailored and customised over the years. Our approach to this new intelligent design solution is to start with a clean slate and build a solution utilising the latest enterprise architecture and technologies.”
The current focus of development for RPM’s ID solution is not on replacing the various entrenched third-party mine design solutions in the market, RPMGlobal said. “Rather, RPM’s focus has been to build on the decades of mining experience from its consulting and advisory businesses in order to produce a truly agile solution to support rapid scenario generation and optimal mine design decision making.”
Mathews said: “It is our strong belief that it is time the mining industry is provided with an intelligent, parametric design solution built upon, and utilising the very latest software technology and enterprise architecture.
“RPM has, to this point, elected not to develop its own mine design software and instead focused on ‘open integration’ with other third-party design applications. This approach was built on the assumption that third-party vendors would allow the free flow of data between applications and across the enterprise. The catalyst for RPM building its own design solution has been driven by the realisation that other suppliers to the industry have inherent limitations around enterprise interoperability. Furthermore, as the engineering process ‘starts with design’, a comprehensive RPM suite of planning products needs to include ID solutions in order to round out RPM’s established suite of integrated solutions.”
According to Mathews, RPM has been a data consumer of all of the established third-party mine design product vendors for decades. “We have ‘seen it all’ and, as a result, have a good understanding of the key ‘pain points’ currently being faced by mining engineers when using these traditional mine design solutions. Our goal with this new product suite is to address these key issues in a user-friendly and technically advanced manner. We will, of course, continue to work closely with the established third-party mine design software vendors and promote open standards with the intent of offering mining companies a real choice in a plug-and-play enterprise environment.”
RPMGlobal already has the architecture with their existing Enterprise Planning Framework and plenty of the required functionality from the acquisition of the rights to use the Mine 2-4D solution, it said. “The company’s intention is to now work with the industry to build an enterprise application that is fully open, interoperable and will harness the latest technologies bringing everything together into a simplified, enterprise, commercial-off-the-shelf product,” the company said.
Mathews concluded: “A number of our major customers who have seen the approach we are taking during pre-release demonstrations held under confidential terms are very excited with the progress to date and want to be involved in the development programme. Our advisory business, who are end users of third-party tools every day, are also providing invaluable input and insight into the product make-up.”