Benefits of Dashboards for the Mining Industry

If you don't already work actively in the mining industry or on a mine, you might not understand the benefits of a mining industry's dashboard. There are a lot of challenges that the operators and mining process engineers face that need adequate solutions. However, to proffer the adequate solution, there has to be a quantitative and in-depth knowledge of the relevant parameters and processes surrounding those challenges.

This is where the importance of the dashboard within the mining industry starts to show itself. With the dashboard, operators can quickly get all the information that they need to understand the problem at hand and provide a long-lasting solution to it. The fact that dashboards are data-driven and produce real-time and reliable estimates of the variables surrounding a process correlated with other systems and are used as vital tools in solving problems make them something of a necessity for the mining industry.

Just in case you still are not convinced about the benefits of the dashboard for the mining industry, this article from authors at essay writing service reviews highlights some of the significant benefits of the dashboard for this industry.

Key Decision Making

Many decisions are taken every day in the mining sector, and the key reason for this is to ensure that they work in line with their production policies. Therefore, it is essential to have a precise understanding of everything that is happening and many processes that operate around the clock. There has been an increase in the level of automation in the mining industry in more recent times which has made it a lot more complicated and challenging to ensure full-time monitoring.

It is costly to shut down mining activity to carry out reactive or planned maintenance. This is why it is essential to know what is most likely to fail, and more importantly when it is expected to fail. This can be the game-changer in the mining industry in which every minute of operation counts. And the best way to track everything happening within the mining site and know what and when is likely to fail is by using a mining dashboard.

Dealing with Environmental Pollution Effectively

Topics that are very much related to the industry are the consumption of raw materials and power. There are also issues related to environmental pollution that need to be looked at, which adds more load to the already complex decision-making process. This is another reason why it is essential to know what is happening and where it is happening.

This accurate awareness will make it easy to work out a mitigation strategy that is highly effective against the failure of equipment and other things that might result from environmental damage. The only way to get this much needed accurate awareness is by using a dashboard. Again, this goes to show how beneficial and vital a dashboard is to the mining industry.

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Safety of Mining Personnel

One essential aspect of the mining and mining industry as a whole is the safety of personnel. Although it also holds so much importance in other sectors and industries, within the mining industry, it is more than just necessary; it is the top priority. As a part of the strategy to protect the personnel, there are now devices worn on the body provided for them. And the data that is gotten from these devices can be imputed to the dashboard so that the managers can get another vital information for the continuous monitoring and overall assessment strategy of the organization.

Big Data in the Mining Industry

There are many challenges when it comes to handling big data within the mining industry. It is one problem that has existed for a very long while now, and the solution to it is an analytics and the use of dashboards. With the dashboard, it is easier to create an aggregate of all the data and go through different software commonly used within the industry to develop drill-down reports. There are various sources of data, but the most common ones are:

• Master Data Management and GeoScientific systems like GeoSequel, acQuire, Vulcan, Deswik, etc.
• Fleet Management Systems like Sandvik OptiMine, Wenco, GroundHog Fleet Management, JigSaw, Modular Mining, and Caterpillar MinesStar.
• Equipment Health Data from the major manufacturers of heavy equipment like Caterpillar, Terex, Hitachi, Sandvik, Komatsu, Liebherr, Epiroc, John Deere, Doosan, etc.
• Drone Data from volumetric data providers such as Propeller, Kespry, and others.
• ERP Data from companies like SAGE, Oracle Financials, and SAP.

These systems provide decision support and are created to help the mine managers, corporate officers, and other supervisors make decisions that are entirely data-driven while backing them up with meaningful insights.

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Bottom Line

All managers at mining companies need a dashboard that can key metrics and data affecting their company's mining operations in real-time. This gives them quicker access to the data from the field to work more efficiently to improve their operations and the output of the mine more ultimately. All that they need is a dashboard that can show them the necessary real-time display in the form of a chart or a graphic.

Many of these dashboards come with a capability for dual languages and have predefined roles that ensure that the KPIs that are most relevant to a particular role are the ones that are displayed. Instead of having to export the data into a Microsoft Excel file, and users can access all the data they need and perform whatever analysis they need any time they need it.

The ability of mine operation managers to see their data, analyze it, and extract the actionable information from it is sure to improve efficiency and productivity at the mine. Using a mining dashboard can also be the foundation on which the company builds its effort to make its reporting process and systems more standard.
Mining companies that have already adopted the use of dashboards and analytics have reported massive improvements in their team performance, profitability, and productivity. The dashboards also ensure that the managers using them can monitor real-time mining operations, which helps them be more productive—driving their production up by some few more millions of worth.

There is no denying the importance of dashboard and analytics for the mining industry. Your daily production metrics are captured within the dashboard, and these metrics' information is collected from different corporate systems and mine sites. Then all of this is made into the dashboard for the COO and GM of the mine site operations to view and analyze.

The dashboard not only contains information about the operations at the mine site, such as safety, maintenance, and production data, as this article emphasized. But it also includes information about the financial parts, such as the actual budget, price forecast, and the variance.

Without a dashboard to provide all the information as this article has highlighted, it will be quite evident that there is a large gap between data collection, data analysis, and data reporting in the mining industry. This gap is what the dashboard fills, and this is why it can boost efficiency and productivity in the mine site.
Analytic solutions are indeed proprietary and static, so it is difficult to change and manage them. This is unlike other challenges specific to the industry and requires flexibility and collaboration. The problem is, there are different definitions, systems, and structures for the mining industry, which leads to silos in data and processes, affecting data integrity, and also creating information gaps.

But with a mining dashboard, all of these silos will be removed. Real-time data means that there will be no issues with data integrity, and it will be easy to fill the data gaps in a unique way for the individual mine sites.