Digital Transformation: Increasing Efficiency and Profit in the Mining Business

The report focuses on the practical aspects of digital transformation using the example of the mining company EMCO, describing the conditions necessary for transformation, barriers, and ways to eliminate them.
Over 6 years, EMCO increased its productivity in terms of rock mass by 3.4 times, became the largest open-pit mine in the CIS, and came very close to the top 10 world leaders. Over the same period, EMCO reduced the cost of coal production by 10% and ensured EBITDA growth by 2.4 times. Thus, the company demonstrated how the use of digital technologies allows for significant, almost exponential, growth in the mining business while significantly reducing costs.
The experience of the digital transformation of EMCO shows that the optimization and management of processes in the mining industry has its specifics, also due to the discrete nature of mining operations. Using real cases as an example, the report provides an assessment of the potential of such processes and ways to implement them using our digital platform.
The report pays special attention to the digital platform PULSE (the company's development), as it is the technical core of the transformation. A general vision of the PULSE digital platform, a description of the modules, and technical advantages are provided. Each module of the digital platform allows one to optimize a separate business process (equipment performance, fuel efficiency, dump truck speed control, predictive equipment maintenance, balancing of equipment complexes, monitoring of losses, active shift management, etc.) and take remote control of processes enterprises as a whole. PULSE takes production management processes to a new level by analyzing big data, processing it with artificial intelligence, and issuing recommendations to all key persons involved in shift management – supervisors, managers, and equipment operators.
The report ends with the company's development plans related to efficiency increase and digital transformation.