With numerous challenges facing today’s mining industry including increasing social and regulatory issues, difficult mining conditions (including deeper ore deposits), declining commodity prices and an aging workforce, the importance of applying true digitalisation strategies to the dynamic mining environment continues to increase. This means moving from equipment-centric to holistic solutions that can optimise mine peformance and lower cost per tonne – bringing together smart equipment with built-in sensors; advanced services beyond just field repairs and data monitoring to manage machine health.

Komatsu believes it can help mining customers move towards a true digital mine – a collaborative ecosystem where there are multiple people, processes and technologies all working together in harmony. There is so much potential in data analytics all the way from tasks right up to overarching systems. The true digital mine will integrate all these multiple data sources and democratise the information making it accessible to all stakeholders. That said, the data analytics are most useful and have the greatest potential when you know the exact nature of the problem you are trying to solve.

Moving onto the rise of autonomy, this requires the next level of network capabilities and in many ways this in itself is unlocking more potential of data analytics in being able to take the information in real time, process it in the Cloud and drive key findings such as benchmarking results back down to where the analytics can be best used whether that be the operator, the dispatcher or even to the machine itself.