Share

The AusIMM Mining Geology Conference for 2019 is taking place in Perth from 25-26 of November and Phinar Software is happy to announce that we’ll be there in booth 34.

This is the premier international Mining Geology event of the year and the theme ‘Innovating the Mining Chain’ resonates strongly with us because innovation is one of our core values.

Giving a nod to this theme, Phinar Software managing director Rob de Bruin said: “This conference gives us a great opportunity to show people what we’ve been working on over the past year. We will be introducing our new cutting-edge cloud-enabled workflow and optimisation technology, as well as exploring some exciting new updates to our X10-Geo software.”

We are also pleased to announce that we are collaborating with Platinum Sponsor Rene Sterk and his team at RSC Mining and Minerals Exploration who are presenting at the conference. To help him out, we used the advanced workflow technology and algorithms in X10-Geo to tailor a multi-step automated solution that allowed him to explore and develop the fascinating ideas around contact domaining in his presentation ‘Domaining in Resource Estimation’.

Phinar Software’s interactive workflow technology can be used to transform some of your old manual tasks. If you are involved in exploration or resource evaluation you can automate and optimise your important business processes to improve your overall efficiency and accuracy. It is especially easy to combine our workflow technology with X10 Geo’s advanced data analytics giving you easy access to X10-Geo’s rich set of standard 3D integrated graphing, analytics and statistical tools right within the workflow. When you integrate software apps into your X10 workflow as well, you enable an exchange of information between systems that ultimately allows you to build sophisticated and optimised business solutions that create real insights into your data.

The presentation at the conference provides a useful and practical example of this. It demonstrates how you can use a multi-stepped workflow to manipulate and transform your data into actionable results. Rene uses a Boundary Analysis approach in the workflow leveraging X10-Geo in a series of automated processes and tasks to produce optimised cut off grades. Combining the workflow technology with X10-Geo’s advanced analytics and visualisation he was able to load and analyse the data and produce contact definitions for a series of grade cutoffs. By graphically setting an optimised cut off using in-graph sliders he was able to define a mineralisation domain and create and analyse the associated contact plots. Reporting the results was easy with one simple click to place graphs and tables into his documents.

Contact Domain Analysis graph showing contact definition, dilution and ore loss v cut-offs with a slider to set the cut-off.

As you can see Phinar Software’s Workflows are great for:

  • Streamlining and automating repeatable tasks on a project or at departmental level saving you time and making you more efficient
  • Improving quality control by minimising errors and increasing accuracy
  • Giving you a greater insight into your processes allowing for business process optimisation and improvement
  • Increased visibility through tracking and measuring with audit trails
  • Running automated processes (in parallel) on your own computer, on computers on the local network or in the Cloud
  • We have also developed a workflow for a top tier mining company that automates and optimises several of their more difficult ore control jobs that require regularly updated data. This workflow loads and optimises the in-situ block model to create mineable and optimised ore zones (dig lines). A process central to the workflow was one that auto-digitised polygons according to material type boundaries created by third-party optimisation software that was integrated into the workflow

These ore control jobs had previously been completed using a manual/software combination that was time-consuming and prone to inconsistencies. By creating a workflow that incorporates a third- party application to optimise the block model, we were able to automate and streamline the process, saving our client significant amounts of time, increasing accuracy and adding visibility through easily accessed audit reports.

De Bruin said: “Even though with these solutions you automate your manual processes, you can easily pause the workflow when you need to and manually set your important parameters, often graphically, to ensure optimised results. Although we do value machine learning, we also recognise the amazing capacity for experienced users to find patterns in graphs.”