Under the agreement Sandvik and IBM will develop analytics solutions to improve safety, maintenance, productivity and operational services of mining and rock excavation equipment.

They have signed a memorandum of understanding with the stated intent of creating market leading offerings in data driven productivity and predictive maintenance solutions.

The two companies are already working jointly with selected customers to pilot the concept and commercialise specific solutions.

The first wave of work will be done on loaders and trucks, connecting up to 15 units and integrating live data from multiple on and off-board systems to run the analytic algorithms.

The IBM-Sandvik collaboration will involve the use of advanced analytics, remote monitoring and cognitive technologies.

The aim is to let miners combine equipment and application data from disparate sources and automatically analyse patterns in the data to improve performance and productivity.

Sandvik reported cost per tonne decreases of 20%-50% with some of the latest digital technologies it fitted to its machines.

It expects this developing analytical capability will push that down further.

“Sandvik has been working with mining customers on mine automation and remote monitoring of machines for more than 20 years,” Sandvik Mining and Rock Technology president Lars Engstrom said.

“Our OptiMine and AutoMine solutions are also important systems for data collection and consolidation that provides us with a great platform to get a flying start with IBM analytics solutions. So it is a natural step for us to collaborate with a company such as IBM – experts in advanced analytics cognitive computing and modelling – to create even more value to our customers.”

IBM Europe vice-president industrial products industry Anders Fredholm said there were great benefits to be had through the collaboration.

“We look forward to taking our expertise in the Internet of Things, advanced analytics and asset management and combining that with Sandvik’s years of experience in developing mining processes and machine technology to build a collaboration around innovation and delivery of smarter digital services offerings for natural resource companies around the globe,” Fredholm said.

Sandvik is not the first company to seek collaboration with a technology provider to boost its big data analytics capabilities.

Caterpillar joined forces with Uptake to boost its own big data efforts and Atlas Copco is also developing data analytics solutiosn.

The desire to make better use of the amount of information mining machines can provide has also caused a change underground.

A number of mines are starting to boost the number of data collection points underground so they can get as close to real-time data as possible.