Molycop

The current state

There is sufficient evidence to say that over the past decades, the mining industry has had to face a number of challenging scenarios. Improving productivity to overcome natural factors such as decreasing ore grades, deeper deposits and harder rock mass combined with increasing environmental and social awareness has driven the industry to constantly work on enhancing processes across the whole value chain. At the same time, skills shortages have accelerated, and productivity has declined. These challenges, coupled with the declaration of the zero carbon, or carbon neutral, targets within specific, short timeframes, means our industry needs to make step-change rather than incremental improvements. This is where innovation and product development lie at the heart of a sustainable future.

Recent industry research provides insight into the history of innovation in mining. Broadly, this can be summarised as an industry that is conservative, favouring incremental improvement rather than step change. It is an industry that relies on suppliers, large and small, for its innovation. Innovation has been driven mostly by cost-cutting and regulation compliance. For the case of the processing circuit, innovation has been undertaken in focused ‘silos’ with little attention paid to how one plant and equipment project might influence upstream and downstream processes. More importantly, the source of those innovations tends to be a wide and varied network of suppliers.

This view is supported by a 2020 study by Australian industry association Austmine. Austmine declares itself as the leading not-for-profit industry association for the Australian Mining Equipment, Technology and Services (METS) sector. The total revenue of the Australian METS sector in 2020 was $AUD114 billion (recovering from COVID).

 In their 2020 survey of 619 METS businesses, 90% said that innovation was important to their business, with two-thirds saying it is very important. The number one and most chosen driver of innovation amongst METS companies is customer-driven problem-solving.

"Simulation, Machine Learning and AI –can both enhance and accelerate new-product projects."

In summary, the mining industry is faced with big challenges that require solutions at specific times. The history of miners to, firstly, slowly develop solutions and, secondly, not deploy these in short timeframes creates an overwhelming situation. Most overwhelmed are the industry suppliers who shoulder the challenge of innovation and product development. Accelerated product development and step-change innovation are seen as the crux of the solution.

Innovation and Product Development

The cornerstone for product development processes is the Stage-Gate® system developed by Cooper in the late 1980s and published in the early 1990s. This process is described as a sequence of steps: ideation, concept, business case, product development, validation, and launch. At every step, the appropriate leader decides whether to exit or move to the next step. The decision event is the ‘Gate’. Cooper’s latest Stage Gate, the Hybrid Sage Gate, has features for accelerating the innovation and product development process. He details that the way to accelerated product development (APD) is via focused project teams coupled with effective portfolio management –fewer projects but better projects. This increases resources on projects to maximize speed. He proposes new digital tools –Virtual Reality, Simulation, Machine Learning and AI –that can both enhance and accelerate new-product projects. He advocates for the inclusion of business operating systems that have become universal in modern business. These include elements of the LEAN and Agile toolboxes, including high customer interaction and the clarity of a value proposition. He provides detail on changing the series-based stage gate approach to one where managers overlap stages in their new-product process and move key decision points forward to minimise the impact of long lead-time tasks. The point is to move faster and drive step change.

Step change to the industry via Digital Transformation is inevitable. Simulation, modelling, and analysis conducted to gain insight into complex systems, testing new operating or resource policies and new concepts or systems before implementing them, and gathering information and knowledge without disturbing the actual system are now critical to accelerating product development. Sensors and the Internet of Things allow for masses of data to be analysed all the time and remotely from the operation. The roadmap for accelerated product development and step-change innovation seems readily available. Is the industry ready and receptive?

Accelerating product development is the desired outcome. However, moving quickly through the Stage Gate has little effect if the industry is not willing to deploy. The critical role for miners lies in the period between proof of concept and proof of value. At this stage, in-field trials and in-field validation are critical. To date, we are poor at this. This is evidenced by the well-known paradigm ‘the first to be second.’ It is interesting that the industry has a name for its hesitancy to embrace innovation and take some risks. This is a paradigm we must break through. Genuine collaboration and innovation partnering have a large role to play. The digital transformation provides a great toolkit to facilitate confidence in the new product/service in question. Behavioural change is the key.