With declining ore grades, rising costs, a shortage of skilled labor, and stringent regulatory compliance, the mining industry is looking for ways to improve productivity. Mining operations worldwide are on the decline for productivity by 28% in the recent decade, calling for automation to increase efficiency. Australia is a leading producer of vital minerals, gas, metals, and ore that drive various commodity prices in global markets and will need a new way of organising systems to continue this economic dependency.
In addition to increasing accuracy, reducing rework, and lowering transaction costs, automation can manage standard and repetitive processes across mining companies.
Business processes in the mining industry are characterised by rule-based and knowledge-based repetitive tasks that add no value to the core business or to the end users. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) offers an approach for automating these time-consuming tasks by using trained and integrated software platforms. By combining RPA with AI (artificialintelligence), robots automate decision-making tasks utilizing cognitive computing and machine learning. Cost-productivity ratios are evolving in response to commodity cycles, increasing the need for alternative competitive differentiators. Additionally, when considering capacity for growth and automation it is also important to note the value these systems have for the execution of waste reduction and environmental benefits.
In the mining industry, a large portion of this work can be automated using RPA to enable and realise touch-less business processes. To maximise the benefits of RPA, the mining industry must identify the key processes and activities that can be automated.
For example, software robots can perform repetitive tasks like extracting, uploading, validating and formatting data, performing calculations, etc. with improved speed and accuracy in a repeatable manner improving the overall efficiency of any of these processes. Going even further beyond the mining activities, automation is amenable to business operations such as payroll run, payroll variance and standard reports, supplier setup, ABN active check, warehouse receivables, reporting, bank or recon, regulatory reporting, etc. All these areas can benefit immensely from RPA for efficiency, quality, and cycle-time reduction.
Diving more into the contents of RPA, it consists of natural language processing capabilities, cognitive capabilities, content analytics, and process automation. The importance of robotic process automation in the mining industry becomes even clearer when we consider how knowledge can be shared, where new markets could be targeted, and how operational safety can also be increased. In asset-intensive industries such as mining, where managing assets throughout their lives require an eye on many remote operations, implementing new technologies collaboratively is crucial. This integration of software and processes facilitates coherent management of the data collected throughout the entire company, allowing fluidity and ease of organisation. These systems may seem difficult to implement and use, but they are now more user-friendly than ever, and the ROI produced is extreme and rapid.
The first step of implementation involves stabilising the legacy systems that need to be automated to ensure there is a little-to-no disruption in the client’s business. From there, these can be standardised to bring uniformity and ensure better resource allocation for cost reductions and consumer satisfaction. The last stage would compile mundane and manual tasks into automation to create a transactional and repetitive nature with software that learns more as it experiences the practice.
The bottom line is that automation exists in the “cloud” on hard drives as well as under the earth for manual tasks. Put simply, there is an easy way to digitise processes in the mining industry that are not as intimidating as they may seem. Making the transition is costly, but produces a much stronger ROI, sound environmental benefits, and labor safety. Therefore, it is not surprising that many mining businesses have already made the switch or are seriously considering implementing automation.
In the mining industry, digital processes are increasingly transforming, and improvements in information technology have improved operations automation as well as increased the number of robotic devices.
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