In this video
Heath Arvidson
Chief Geoscientist
Mark Forster
Chief Development Officer
Mark:
In the mine geology data management area, a lot of organizations have solutions in place but they don’t have great integration with their mind planning tools. And also, they tend to not manage their spatial information as well. With our solution maximum return, it covers the full open pit block out process, it manages all the spatial data, and it tracks all your logging, your sampling, and your assay results so that geologists are able to use that information to get a better understanding of material behavior and grade, etc. as it hits the plant and his mine and moves through the process. The important point is that mine geology is the first step in the process and usually, they’re quite often understaffed and overworked in a sense so they perhaps don’t have the time to spend that they’d like to understand the geology, etc. And having the right kind of data management solution in place, helps drive those efficiencies so that people can spend their time on the important thing which is understanding the geology.
Heath:
So let me just chip in there. As a senior mine geologist or an operational superintendent on the site, it’s your responsibility to make sure that the mining guys know exactly where every rock needs to end up in the mine. And that’s the role of the geology function to demarcate different material types and tell the mining guys – that rock has to go to the mill, that’s got to go to this dump. Sometimes because of the production pressure, the samples that feed into the process don’t come back in time or it’s just in time and I’ve seen lots of examples where blasts have been initiated without a full set of information supporting the decision about where these rocks go. That’s a disastrous situation that’s going to cost you money when that happens. So as the senior mine geologist or superintendent it’s their responsibility to make sure they’ve got the information at the right time and they produce the block outs that we’ll talk about in a minute, so the mining guys know what to do. So it’s supercritical, the key thing for this solution for me is that it provides not only the management and the integration but the review of quality and quality control of the samples and the process. Because that’s where you make or lose money.
Mark:
And I think the other thing there is it’s not just about understanding the grade. One of the big things our customers have said to us is understanding the nature of the materials because obviously, it’s important from a handleability perspective moving forward.
