Next-Generation Mine Reconciliation
Mine reconciliation is a critical part of industry operations. It is how a business verifies if performance is keeping up with their goals, if their predictions were on point, and it highlights areas that need improvement. This intricate process has been met with significant struggles in recent years.
Current Challenges
Mines are facing a critical skills shortage due to the retirement of seasoned professionals and declining interest among younger generations. Skills such as blasting and material movement are highly experienced-based and this knowledge is not quickly passed on to new hires.
Reconciling planned production versus actual production can easily become inconsistent without the hands-on knowledge of seasoned professionals. This gap in knowledge increases the chances of inefficiencies and losses.
However, skills alone aren’t the only challenge. Mines struggle with additional issues such as real-time visibility due to delayed data reporting, incorrect blast sampling, unexpected fragmentation, and operational disruptions. But the most significant problem is reconciling after the fact and not when issues are happening.
A solution lies in adopting a powerful knowledge system that can facilitate and automate material tracking, provide location, movement tracking and optimization, fragmentation analysis, modeling and predictions, plant monitoring and optimization systems. This provides better information as well as validation to trust the data and identify underlying issues. When reconciliation is done closer to real-time, there are greater opportunities to correct issues.
Knowledge systems continuously learn from data, provide guidance, give proactive alerts, and empower new professionals with the institutional knowledge of their predecessors, providing next-generation mine reconciliation.
The SourceOne EKPS Impact
SourceOne® EKPS is a knowledge system that provides real-time ingestion of data across the mining value chain, and gives insights to efficiently track material composition, quality, and movement. It also integrates planning and geological models, helping to reconcile material movements.
It can handle both structured and unstructured formats from diverse sources, including IoT devices, legacy databases, ERP systems, and cloud platforms. Context is then added to the ingested data with the use of ontology and knowledge graphs.
SourceOne provides real-time advanced analytics powered by grounded AI, which can be compared against the mine plan, in addition to customizable applications and immediate deviation detection.
Its reconciliation capabilities don’t just enhance operational precision; they also promote sustainability, traceability, and compliance, all while allowing the system to scale and evolve to the mine’s needs. With SourceOne, the next generation of mine reconciliation becomes not only possible but practical.
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