For modern-day miners as with other businesses, there has never been a greater need to be able to respond to regulatory requirements and legislative changes, particularly in light of the enhanced criminal penalties for misreporting company financial information.

In the mining software arena, this means mining companies require reporting and management systems that are secure, accurate and reliable, and offer greater transparency across the entire scope of the mining process.

John Buffington, general manager of mining software and consultancy company Runge, told Australia’s Mining Monthly that the growing international trend toward stricter business reporting environments was impacting both customer demands and software developments.

“Obviously for anyone listed on the US exchange, with Sarbanes-Oxley and also the [European] SCE regulations, [the compliance issue] is extremely important,” he said. “They’ve got to be able to justify and show why and how they came up with any numbers that are presented publicly. So any production expectations, any projected financials need to be able to be fully justified and backed up.”

Curiously, there was little noise about this issue from one mega-mining house, with a representative from BHP Billiton saying that compliance issues such as Sarbanes Oxley “hasn’t impacted on mining software requirements”.

According to industry observer and former Surpac staffer Ivan Gustavino, stricter reporting requirements, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley act in the US and JORC compliance in Australia, were a driving force behind a host of quality based software products.

He told AMM that as mining companies moved to boost their corporate compliance, new opportunities were arising for the mining software industry.

“It means [mining software companies] have got a great opportunity to start providing software solutions to assist the mining companies to deal with a significant headache,” he said.

Gustavino said there needed to be greater transparency within corporate operations so that those at the lower levels, who were dealing with the various systems, could communicate back to the boardroom. He said software companies were ideally placed to develop new solutions to new problems.

Integration

Datamine general manager Doug Sisson told AMM that while there was still a “fairly high degree” of segmentation within the market, he increasingly saw a move toward more integrated end-to-end software solutions that still had the capacity to cater for individual needs.

In Sisson’s view, the success of the mining software process rested on data and process integrity. He said there was a need to have systems that could not only meet basic standards but that could ensure “some of the people further down the track are making decisions based on the right information”

Sisson highlighted the importance of how software integration was intertwined with compliance.

“If you know where the data came from … and how it’s utilised and how it’s stored and all the various security elements around it … you can satisfy some of the compliance requirements,” he said.

Maptek Australia general manager Peter Johnson said demand was growing for integrated systems that allowed users to cross-check steps of the mining process.

“Information is added – often from different sources – along the way and the ability to retain access to any of this information for decision and evaluation purposes throughout the process is becoming more and more in demand,” he said.

“Comparing production performance data with long-term plans or ore body models in real-time is an example of this, where having these sets of information available not just for reporting but for confirmation, evaluation and adjustment of any of the factors affecting the various sets of data, can be achieved.”

Standardisation

Also interlinked with compliance, the issue of standardisation is emerging as another matter.

As corporations grew into global enterprises with expanding worldwide operations, there was increased need for uniformity in software processes.

Gustavino said a lot of the standards were being driven by the larger mining houses such as BHP and Rio Tinto, which were seeking commonality between their far-flung operations.

“The benefits to them is that they have so many disparate organisations that are communicating virtually in different languages … so they’ve got data coming back that might be reported in one way in one country and one way in another. But when it hits them it’s very hard to interpret,” he said.

Gustavino said while issues at a local level might require a separate individualised solution, at the executive board level standardised presentation of information made overall interpretation easier.

Standardised systems could have operational benefits particularly when it came to the reporting, managing and interpretation processes and could assist in meeting compliance requirements.

Other commentators raised the issue of the skills shortage as another case for the standardised approach.

“The customers now [are increasingly wanting standardised systems] for a combination of [reasons], including lack of people and the need to have commonality in systems when people move around,” said Runge’s Buffington.

For Datamine, itself a global business with an international customer-base, Sisson spoke of his company’s vision.

“We’re aiming very much for global consistency,” he said. “The mining industry is a global business, you might have a company doing exploration in half a dozen countries but may be interpreting [the data] in one. So making the data available in a consistent format enables that.”

Perth-based software maker Micromine has a system called Dome that it claims will help standardise the reporting between different software systems.

Technology

With this grab bag of issues, the actual software may almost seem like an afterthought, but plainly, industry is not resting on its laurels.

“We’re continually working on enhancements to our software to make it easier to use, more intuitive and also make the output from the software more readily presentable,” Buffington said.

While issues of corporate compliance may be driving changes toward more complex and integrated analytical systems, at the same time there is growing demand for friendlier, less complicated user interface systems. Buffington said anything that could simplify the process and provide a more tangible feel to operations was a step in the right direction.

Driven by goals of improved productivity, efficiency and profitability, Maptek’s Johnson said service was just as important as delivering a capability.

“Services in combination with products [particularly considering] the size and scope of mining operations globally, and the requirement for integration with either other systems or other operational projects, has increased the need for managed services to be combined with product capability. It is not enough to deliver a product anymore,” he said.

Johnston said managed services were now becoming an expectation and allowed miners to extract the full value of the product.

Looking to the future, all industry players recognised the importance of innovation to the mining software game.

As Gustavino sees it: “There’s always innovation going on and there’s always more things to be done.”

Published in the June 2007 Australia’s Mining Monthly