Streamlining Mining Industry Issues Using Power BI's Abilities

Through this newsletter, we desire to expand our understanding of Power BI in the mining industry, intending to help technological expansion even in this sector.?

To elucidate our point, we choose to share one such mentionable journey we took a few months ago with a major mining company of the United States and Canada.?

Our journey with them was indeed an incredible one.??

We would describe it as an immersive and wholesome experience.??

With every journey we undertake, we learn great things, thus paving the way ahead for us!???

Who They Were??

While talking to them, we learned that they did with the mining industry what we did with technologies—help make lives better.??

Their desire for rigorous quality maintenance is what drew them to us.??

We remember a small query email from them, and all that went ahead became a journey worth sharing.??

What they did was both invigorating and exciting. We were working with a mining giant, who, we learned, dealt with zinc, copper, and steelmaking coal supplies.?

What was their specialty as an industry??

Our next step was also a learning process, and it included knowing more about their products and business. Basically, they dealt with zinc, copper, and steelmaking coal products, and a sneak peek into their work could help us understand the amount of work we needed to do with them.?

More about their products and earnings?

Copper:?

We found that 20% of their gross profit was from copper. They have an annual supply of 33 million tons of contained copper shifted into suitable reserves and indicated resources.??

Scope of Work:?

We could gauge our scope of work when they said they had four operating mines of copper in South America and Canada, where they were also planning to undertake huge developmental projects.??

Use of copper served by them:?

Copper is in huge demand in the clean technology market and is used regularly in construction, power generation, and transmission, apart from being a hot star in the field of electronics.?

Zinc:?

Not just the largest producers of mined zinc (295,000 tons of refined zinc meeting the ISO 9001:2015 standard), they are also operating as the largest facilitators of lead and zinc smelting and refining.??

Uses of zinc they served:?

They not only serve as the leading zinc suppliers, but also tend to the healthcare industry’s needs, and are suppliers for the world’s infrastructural needs.??

Steelmaking Coal:?

A total of 60% of their revenue came from steelmaking coal.??

Scope of Work:?

With them being the largest North American steelmaking coal producers, we were quite surprised when we knew we were working with the second largest seaborne steelmaking coal exporters. With five mines in British Columbia and one in Alberta, it meant we had a lot of work to do.?

Uses of steel they served:?

A lot of our steelmaking coal went to the steelmaking and manufacturing industries. We also helped with urbanization and infrastructural development.?

In the next phase, our goal was to analyze their major hurdles and remediate suitable solutions for them. It meant studying their goals, technological expectations, and regular requirements.?

What kind of technological transformation did they want??

They, like many other industries, are undergoing a rapid technological transformation and, in the process, are trying to adopt and adapt more and more digital solutions.??

Here is a brief of their problems, aim and their end goals we helped solve.?

Problem 1: No digitalization of their transport company?

Their aim:?

• They wanted to streamline their transport company.?
• Their associated business processes also needed to undergo appropriate streamlining.?

Their Endpoints:?

• The company preferred increasing their organization’s overall efficiency.?
• Cost cutting was also one of the targeted endpoints for them.?

Problem 2: Their Legacy System?

Their aim:?

• They wanted better technical efficiency.?
• Their aim was to create a highly productive workforce.?

Their Endpoints:?

• To reduce the amount of time it took for their proper functioning under their legacy system.?
• Improving the work efficiency of their employees.?

Problem 3: Business Analysis was a manual process?

Their aim:?

• They wanted more accurate business analysis and preferred a chart for viewing their entire data in one place.?
• Improve their take on the delayed analysis problem to get a better hold of their every-minute situation.?

Their Endpoints:?

• A firm technological replacement for their internal files and Excel files. It was supposed to help their business analysts analyze data better.?
• Quicker turnaround time for reports.?

Problem 4: Making the transportation of goods more visible?

Their aim:?

• The arriving and departing vessels should be visible to their customers and them.?
• They needed a 24/7 regular report on their vessel’s every minute position.?

Their endpoints:??

• They wanted to meet the customer satisfaction metric more often.?
• Knowing the regular position of the vehicles could empower them better about how they needed to solve problems if at all these vehicles got into any.?

Problem 5: Regular pulling of reports was a challenge with the use of Excel sheets.?

Their aim:?

• To deliver four different types of reports regularly:??

Safety and Incidence Report?

Hourly net dumping report?

Ship Loading Report that needed to be generated in kilotons.?

Maintenance Report?

• They needed different real-time analytics.?

Their endpoints:??

• Keep a close watch on these four kinds of reports.?
• Maintain, understand, analyze, and operate through the different analytics during the day regularly.?

What did they want us to keep in mind while we devised a solution??

• Climate Change??
• Their families in the Elk valley where they preferred a cleaner environment?
• Indigenous communities and people??
• The Biodiversity Factor?
• Circularity?
• Tailings Management?

What Technology could solve their problems??

Power BI could do all that they wanted for their transformation.?

Power BI could connect and bind all their locations- United States, Canada, Chile, and Peru.?

How did we tune Power BI for their needs??

Step 1: We analyzed their existing way of working, considered their problems and studied their legacy system for a better understanding of their working process.?

Step 2: To improve their operational efficiencies, we laid down an operational analytics dashboard proposal.?

Step 3: We ran queries, got the latest data version, and analyzed the gap in the reports.?

Step 4: By employing the Power BI desktop application, we enabled it for baseline calculations to comfortably generate four different types of reports.?

Did they benefit from associating with us??

Evolvous, a Microsoft Gold Partner, believes in resolving issues occurring at organizational levels that prevent them from achieving their full potential.?

The question was, with all our efforts, were we able to solve the problems of a mining giant??

Here’s what the clients acknowledged: they did better with our technological implementations.?

• Immersive data viewing abilities:?

With the help of the immersive interactive Power BI geared dashboard, they had time-to-time update on all the data right in front of them that they needed to run their whole organization.?

• Better control over vehicles:?

They were aware of the loading and unloading times of their vehicles and products. It meant better control of their transportation system and lesser misses and unsafe zones.?

• Increased overall efficiency:?

The operation of these dashboards increased their overall efficiency and helped employees achieve more every day.?

• Better customer satisfaction:?

Customers could view the costs of their products, which in turn helped them plan, budget, and effectively manage and make the right choices. With every right choice a customer made, they wholesomely reduced their expenses on it and, in return, contributed towards greater customer satisfaction KPIs.?

• One Dashboard, One Data:?

With the four reports all in one place, people at the organizational level could better view their KPIs—daily, weekly, and monthly—against the baselines. Comparing data became easier, and so did the implementation of solutions.?

• Close watch on capabilities:?

For our clients, inferring from their efficiencies and inefficiencies has become easier. Solving their weaker points, plugging their errors became synchronous and timely.?

• Pronounced incident reporting facilities:?

Enabling incident reporting helped them take better safety and security measures to prevent unforeseen issues and circumstances from stopping their growth.?

• Better safety measures for employment:?

They inched towards a safer working environment and a better work-life balance for their employees.?

• Immaculate data analysis and collaboration:?

Data analysis and collaboration across teams and departments became neater and stronger, and version control no longer served as a worrying point for them.?

Our Take Home From this Association...?

Once our technological aids started functioning smoothly, they brought our clients more than their expected results, and we knew it was time for us to move on.??

We were happy that their organization scaled better and performed immensely well with our right efforts.?

This whole process of technological deployment for them also taught us a lot about our skillsets, about people, organizations, and the road ahead.?

We know we play an important role, and we also know we would perform even better with each of our clients as we kept learning from all our previous experiences.?

Try Power BI’s technological intricacies with us?

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