Digging Deep Dialogue 08: Hivekit

Digging Deep (DD) jets off to Berlin to spend time with Wolfram Hempel (WH), Co-Founder and CEO of Hivekit , a vendor agnostic platform that lets you aggregate all your mine site’s data in one place, get a real time view of your operations, coordinate staff, vehicles and machinery and automate your site for unmatched levels of efficiency and resource utilization. Wolfram had a colorful history before getting into industrial applications, spanning from multiplayer gaming and investment banking to open source and cloud computing. Let's dig deeper and learn from Wolfram.

DD: Welcome to the Digging Deep Dialogue Wolfram. It’s good to have you with us. Can you tell us a little about your background and how you came into the mining industry?

WH: Sure. It’s great to be here and to speak with you. My background is in connectivity and self-orchestrating systems. That’s a fairly novel field that learns from the way that bee swarms, ant colonies, financial markets or complex societies organize themselves efficiently without central control. It then applies these learnings to new areas - in my case to networking and industrial processes.

What sets me apart from others in my field though, is that I’m very hands on and pragmatic in my approach. Hivekit, our platform, reflects this philosophy. It provides very straightforward insight and direct manual control to human operators, giving them the ability to encode recurring processes in macros and only then begins to tap into the more dynamic, self-organizing capabilities that our platform offers.

DD: That sounds interesting. Can you tell us more about what Hivekit is and what it does?

WH: Of course. Hivekit is a mix of asset tracking, operations management and process automation platform.

It lets mining sites connect vehicles, people, machines, sensors and data sources and visualizes their operation in real time in a digital twin. In it, you can overlay routes, overlay metrics and heatmaps, build custom user interfaces to see machine metrics and worker schedules and even rewind time, e.g. to replay the events leading up to an accident.

From here, human mining operators can control every aspect of a site’s operations. It’s a bit like playing a real time strategy game - you select one or multiple workers or vehicles and assign tasks and schedules. Hivekit then translates these into individual commands and sends them out to each worker, vehicle and machine, tracks their progress and completion.

But operators aren’t limited to controlling processes manually. Hivekit allows them to encode recurring workflows in simple macros which are automatically executed by our platform. Macros don’t have to be static, but can also take the form of “if (event happens / condition applies) then (perform steps A,B and C).

This can be as simple as checking access privileges for contractors (if worker enters area and area clearance > worker clearance, raise alarm), implementing ventilation on demand (if elevator approaches shaft and has worker inside, switch on ventilation) and as complex as multi step workflows (if tailings in area build up, reroute excavator and haul trucks until tailings fall below critical level).

What makes this really powerful is that over time ever larger parts of a site run on autopilot which lets human operators increasingly focus on optimizing efficiency.

DD: That sounds very ambitious! Are mines ready for this level of automation?

WH: Honestly - it’s a mixed bag. Equipment vendors have strong incentives to create closed ecosystems that lock their customers into their stack. Many mines work around this by adding aftermarket trackers and sensors to their machines. Likewise, the degree of technology in mining operations varies widely. We’ve seen everything from foreman yelling orders through a bullhorn to sophisticated, NASA level command centers.

Hivekit is built to work in either environment. It comes with open standards and a wide range of protocols and integration options - but it also has some very pragmatic, hands on solutions. For example, Hivekit allows you to print out QR codes to stick onto vehicles. If a driver scans these, the vehicle’s location, orientation and speed is mapped to the driver’s phone - making for a simple solution to vehicle tracking without the need for additional hardware.

DD: So you are trying to break open the data silos and closed vendor ecosystems? Is the data stored in your cloud platform?

WH: That’s exactly right. And we’re not just doing that for our sake. Hivekit comes with open APIs that give mine operators complete access to their collected data. This makes it not only easy to generate reports and export data, but also to build applications and use cases on top of it. This creates an abstraction layer that massively reduces vendor lock in and third party risks.

That’s only one option. Hivekit is also available as an on-premises solution. You can run a network of self-orchestrating nodes directly on-site. This reduces dependency on internet connections and ensures that sensitive data stays securely on site.

DD: Let's take a leaf off what is on the horizon. What's in store for Hivekit in the future?

WH: We’ve been increasingly focused on mining projects in Africa lately. This is a super dynamic market with fast decision times (by mining industry standards) and a great hunger for innovation. We’ve found that Hivekit’s incremental and pragmatic design and its rugged and resilient nature are a great fit for the conditions in the African mining industry.

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