Mining industry is swimming with data. There is data from exploration, geology, mining, processing, shipping and from other areas of the supply chain. Most of this data can only be viewed and analysed within specific software relevant to the domain. Ex: A geological model can be analysed in software such as Vulcan, Suprac etc, A mine model can be analysed in software such as XPAC, Deswik etc. Some software companies do provide end to end solutions combining geology, mine model, mine planning but they have some drawbacks
- Licencing costs are high running upto thousands of dollars annually. Whether you an engineer designing a coal mine or a manager viewing just the outputs you still pay the same licencing fees
- Large mine models tend to be sluggish. Even for basic tasks like viewing a thickness plot you have to open these bulky models and wade through the maze of icons to display the plot which can take up significance amount of time
- They are not intuitive nor interactive to use for the non technical professional.
The last point is very important. These software are highly specialised and can take years to master. Its not easy for say a mine supervisor to open a mine planning software and bring up the mine plan as 1) he/she probably won’t have the licence and 2) they are not technical enough to operate them.
Wouldn’t be great if you could access your mine model/mine plan from a commercially available product (think Excel on steroids) which is fast, intuitive and interactive to use ? If you are excited about this prospect, read on
With Microsoft Power BI you can now analyse your mine model/mine plan by easily extracting your data from any mine planning software. Power BI can ingest data in over 250 different formats (databases, Excel, Csv, cloud) and can manipulate it to give you the desired outputs. It has great mapping capability too and allowing your block layout to be ingested into it. The advantages of using Power BI over mine planning software for analysing your mine model/mine schedule are:
- It is fast, intuitive, and interactive making it ideal for everyone to use it, from a supervisor to the CEO
- A Power BI report is hosted in the cloud and can be shared easily within an organisation with the right security implemented
- Licencing costs are a fraction of the costs associated with mine planning software.
- Power BI is capable of handling large volumes data (1 trillion rows) without being sluggish
- Multiple mine models from different mine sites in an asset can be imported into one Power BI model
Watch this demo video on how to analyse your mine model using Power BI