Modern Mining October 2023

DIGITAL MINE

BME’s Xplolog underpins digital journey in blasting Proving itself as a leading provider of digital eco-systems and services to the mining industry, mining solutions specialist BME recently updated its popular Xplolog system for capturing and analysing data on blast holes and decks.

T he Omnia group company has been driving its tech nology roadmap through its Blast Alliance brand, in which Xplolog is a key digital enabler, according to Christiaan Liebenberg, BME Product Manager: Software Development. Xplolog is the ‘con nector’ between BME’s blast design application Blastmap and its explo sives trucks that are fitted with smart control panels. Actual vs planned comparison

Xplolog provides the ability to capture the actual data for drilling, charging and stemming.

Christiaan Liebenberg, BME Product Manager: Software Development.

“Xplolog provides the ability to capture the actual data for drilling, charging and stem ming – which is compared on a dashboard view with the planned data,” explained Liebenberg. “The actual versus the planned comparison is important to improve our customers’ blasting practice and to hold suppliers accountable for irregularities in the services they have to deliver.” In developing this next-generation Xplolog, he said, the focus was on the detailed guidance

by users. This has helped make the system more user friendly, scalable and streamlined with other BME digital solutions – while also benefiting from improved data security. “By engaging our Xplolog users in a highly sys tematic way, they were able to inform our direction at every step of our upgrade process,” he said. “For instance, we developed mock-ups and wire frames after our first interviews with users, and took those back to the user group for further testing. We took this approach through into the design and prototype stages, so the users were central to the building of the system.” From the ground up The performance of Xplolog was enhanced through the design and application code being built from the ground up, and with a new and upgraded database using Google’s Cloud Services. Scalability is better, with the capacity of the system being able to be rapidly increased. Security has been improved through a more robust log-in and registration process. With different user access levels in the new version, customers have more control over who can access information related to their role in the organisation. “Xplolog also ensures that the data integ rity is not compromised,” said Liebenberg. “By using a reputable cloud platform provider, data

By decreasing the pause period – or idle time – between holes, the smart MMU can increase performance.

30  MODERN MINING  October 2023