Modern Mining December 2021

DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION

Collaboration to drive modernisation of the mining sector South Africa’s mining industry has made substantial progress in its journey towards digital transformation in the last decade,

but partnerships and collaboration will be key to shift the mining sector into the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The role of collaboration in driving mining modernisation was explored by industry delegates at Huawei’s Mining Summit in Johannesburg on 28 October 2021. By Mark Botha .

A ddressing the summit, Huawei vertical solu- tions manager Gys Malan said that, when integrating digital solutions into their busi- nesses, the mining sector needed to be cognisant of fitting the right technologies to the right processes for the best impact. “What businesses often do is to find a solution that has been successful in a specific environment and then try to apply it to all their business require- ments, only to discover that they cannot achieve their business goals.” He says the objective is to take the correct solu- tion and fit it to the relevant business requirements. “You need to challenge yourself to think of ways to achieve your business intent without sacrificing any outcomes. In terms of mining solutions, you must bear in mind the operational environment. That requires you to challenge yourself to find solutions for this operating environment.” He notes the importance of companies like Huawei, who offer a large array of technologies, to invest in research and development (R&D). “When a company like Huawei invests between 14

Gys Malan, Huawei vertical solutions manager. and US$16-billion in R&D annually, you can expect innovation and massive forward movement from a technology point of view.” Malan describes Huawei as “by far the leader” in wireless local-area network (WLAN) technology. “It is not good enough to simply supply WiFi; we want to provide an integration with the operational environ- ment, to bring the IT and operational technologies together. We’ve therefore designed our access points to have multi-service gateway functional- ity for WiFi, Bluetooth, Zigby RFID and others, built into a single access point. This allows you to bring in several other operating technology com- ponents in the mining environment into the same access point.” Collaboration Huawei partner Royal Bafokeng Platinum’s information management manager Karina Geyser adds that innovation doesn’t happen in a siloed space. “Innovation is enabled by collaboration. It’s facilitated when people share ideas with one another, which is why Royal Bafokeng Platinum has built partnerships with compa- nies like Huawei.” She says technology partners working with clients in the mining sector must have a clear understanding of the environments their clients work in. “If you haven’t been underground as a

Partnerships and collaboration will be key to shift the mining sector into the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

30  MODERN MINING  December 2021