An Australian mining technology company has elevated the performance and reach of its advanced mine-data analytics service through a collaboration with US cloud data giant Snowflake.
Adelaide-based MaxMine is promoting delivery of material productivity, environmental and safety improvements credited by users of its data analytics tools, which it says speed interrogation of critical operational information and give site managers better insights to optimise equipment and other asset performance, plans and schedules.
MaxMine has more than 25 terabytes and circa-eight million hours of operational data on Snowflake Data Cloud, which it expects to grow. It says its unique algorithms and use of artificial intelligence can cut typical mining performance analysis times by 80%.
MaxMine founder Tom Cawley says efficiency gains can translate into 10-15% scope-one emission reductions at an “average openpit mine”.
“MaxMine employs data enabling the average openpit mine to improve productivity whilst also reducing its carbon footprint by around 15,000-20,000 tonnes of CO2,” Cawley says.
“At the same time, MaxMine’s safety solutions use data to determine incident causes and opportunities to improve truck operator behaviour.
“With Snowflake we are able to derive greater value and deliver tangible benefits to our customers, supporting them and accelerating their decarbonisation journey.”
Ben Chartier, MaxMine’s head of product development, says the company’s extensive review of modern cloud data technologies led it to the New York-listed, US$53 billion Snowflake about two years ago. After technical evaluation and progression through the process of creating and evaluating a minimum viable product, the pair got to work on a framework that enabled MaxMine to build out its core product analytics capability.
“As MaxMine continued its growth trajectory we built several disparate data systems,” Chartier said.
“We wanted to consolidate all our data products in one location, improve accessibility, and enhance the ability to run big-data queries quickly and efficiently.
“We were looking for a data cloud solution to help streamline our product development for large analytics workloads, assist our client-facing analytics team in answering ad-hoc investigations into customer problems and supplement our existing solutions and services.
“We discovered that we were able to bring ad-hoc analytics and product development closer together with Snowflake Data Cloud to enable a shorter timeframe from the analysis prototype to the functioning product.
“By unlocking this data, we enabled ad-hoc analytics and rapid delivery of insights to our clients.”
MaxMine says its client list includes large contract mining groups and mine owners such as NRW Holdings, Macmahon, First Quantum Minerals and Kinross Gold.
