UC 2021 - Mining User Group (MUG) SIG Meeting Report
We had a great MUG meeting the other day in concert with the virtual Esri 2021 UC, where we held a Panel discussion between some experienced MUG participants.
Opening
Chris Franks (MUG Chairman) reviewed the MUG Mission statement, which is essentially to facilitate the development and implementation of business centric functionality and content between the MUG community, Esri and related Partners. Chris highlighted the value of community collaboration and spoke to the many initiatives used to facilitate those interactions, from webinars and social media, to hopefully social gatherings at conferences and educational exchange meetings in the near future.
Chris then reflected on the UC theme of sustainability from a mining perspective e.g. in relation to sustainable mining practices, carbon and water, while recognizing there are indeed great challenges – there are also terrific opportunities to collaborate through the MUG, in order to find appropriate and effective solutions to those challenges.
Looking forward to MUG Development plans for the next year, Chris invited new MUG members and active participation in the development of MUG Regional Chapters in Latin America, Africa, Australia, North America & Europe, etc. He also pointed to opportunities for cross-collaboration with other relevant industries and provided links to online information resources like the Mining community page on GeoNet a public forum for Q&A, the Ideas Site for product enhancement requests, and the MUG Hub Site for comprehensive resources related to MUG activities e.g. webinars, community contacts, social media links, etc.
Special Interest Group (SIG) Panelist Discussion – Each person on the panel introduced themselves and picked up just one topic that they see as important to the community and that they are personally involved with at present – this served extremely well to intro the panel members and bring some common challenges to the fore straight away.
Roger Bannister (Covia) – Roger emphasized the importance of authoritative content sharing across the enterprise from a single/consistent system of record. As an example Roger described a large data migration project he’s been working to move Covia’s land maps and legal documents to Trimble’s Landfolio and leverage AGOL.
Pieter Mostert (Anglo American) – Took Roger’s point a little further and said he’s been working a lot on Data/Systems Integration & moving to the cloud. He mentioned a few large corporate systems in use at AA & stressed the importance of strong API’s and the ability to share common data sources. Pieter also mentioned how spatial data provides somewhat of a ‘glue’ for data integration and the importance of appropriate data access standards & protocols. He strongly encourages others in the industry to get involved in the discussion around such standards.
Michael Kelly (Teck) – Focused on discussing how his team are consolidating siloed ArcGIS Enterprise instances at mine sites into a single, scalable cloud experience using ArcGIS Enterprise on Kubernetes. Michael stressed that building a similar architecture using the traditional Windows and Linux deployment options would have been much more complicated. There is indeed a learning curve, but initial indications are very promising. He added that global performance, stability and scalability are key factors going forward – so he’s looking very carefully at that and doing a lot of testing.
Chris Franks (Freeport) – Chris discussed the importance of mobility to the modern sustainable development of mine sites, the extensive work that Freeport has been doing in this area and referenced the importance of the sustainability principals outlined by both ICMM and The Copper Mark eg in Tailings management.
Karl Warschaw (BHP) – Karl for his intro discussed the importance of drone imagery and its processing pipeline: capture – store – process – analyze – serve and additional steps like automating extraction for integration purposes, etc. Karl mentioned the challenges of data volumes and remote upload times, storage formats, geoAI, etc.
Andrew McCulloch (OZ Minerals) – Pointed to the many new features & functionality in the ArcGIS platform demonstrated during the UC and how he sees many of those developments aiding with industry challenges and workflows. Andrew picked up on 3D GIS, AR/VR as a particularly interesting aspects for him, also the links to engineering data, GeoBIM, lidar & gaming engines – and how they may help better design & improve operations in the future.
Open, Moderated Q&A Discussion
Q1. What are some of the key trends that you see as important going forward?
In discussion it was clear from several panel members that Information sharing, Hub Sites and AGOL developments are huge to achieve enterprise deployment and create greater value from geospatial data. Hence, cloud capabilities are seen as incredibly important to achieving this and for data & systems integration. Michael stated that at Teck he feels Covid has actually speeded cloud technology adoption at many mine sites and even on-premise implementations are now being moved to dedicated cloud tenants. Karl (BHP) and Andrew (OZ Minerals) both reinforced cloud importance to many of the other initiatives that companies are working on also – imagery, mobility, IoT, AI/ML and spatial analytics, compute, etc – and made the observation that “a solid cloud strategy is going to help you deliver on all of them”.
Andrew (OZ Minerals) also reinforced the importance of 5G, local LTE networks & upcoming technologies like LoRaWAN for supporting mobile application deployment and IoT. With respect to Exploration, he also pointed to innovation needed to meet new ESG standards for exploration efforts e.g. in fuel cell technologies – and that there are many development paths worth watching, which is a challenge in itself...
Q2. What’s happening with the MUG Regional Chapters?
The MUG would like to encourage and facilitate the more formal creation of Regional MUG Chapters with the help of Esri in regions that warrant such development – perhaps on a continental scale to begin with – Latin America, North America, Africa, Europe/Middle East, Australia/SE Asia. The MUG Steering Committee and Esri will begin to create this infrastructure, connect with local Esri Distributors in region to help with logistics and be back in touch shortly to initiate.
Q3. How have you managed the Cloud migration to date and what are your plans/next steps forward?
Roger (Covia) pointed to the ‘age of Covid’ necessity to work from home and still be able to ‘get at everything’ – he suggested that the cloud has helped streamline and accelerate this trend of ‘remote connection’. Pieter agreed and added that power users at AA have been used to using remote machines for many years – so the move to the cloud did not feel alien to them at all. He added that AA is quickly moving to an environment of federated enterprise cloud servers across the globe and in-country machines where required, and he expects that configurable Azure deployed desktops will provide the power and flexibility needed to deliver benefits like moving compute close to the data, whenever & wherever required.
Karl (BHP) brought up a challenge that he perceives and was echoed by Andrew & others – in moving data to and from the cloud, especially in remote locations. Andrew (OZ Minerals) mentioned promising Edge compute options and different styles of comms channels coming. Andrew also mentioned new methodologies in Image processing of taking processing power to the data and pondered if that methodology may become more common w.r.t. other datatypes. Pieter added that for heavy data uploads AA is experimenting with loading big Azure Server machines locally and then shipping them to the cloud-based data center – where ‘light interaction’ from anywhere is required.
Q4. Covid related trends/surprises – things that worked or didn’t...
Roger commented that his Covia’s move to AGOL was extremely timely, because it allowed them to ramp their remote operations data sharing and deploy new applications with ease as they flexed to accommodate the new circumstances. Peter (AA) remarked that there was a sharp rise in productivity and innovation, as people focused on work from home, he agreed with Roger about the flexibility of being able to deploy apps remotely and collaborate using apps like Teams on joint projects was really good. Michael (Teck) agreed that on the whole Covid related disruption was minimized due to the tech that was already in place, this would not have been the case in the past and probably saved many companies.
Q5. Does the panel have comments & advice around geology and high-wall mapping, perhaps using drones?
Andrew (OZ Minerals) commented on new developments coming in drone based structural, geological and engineering mapping both in surface and underground mining e.g. from Emesent and Maptek – and that we should be expecting lots of developments in this area as it’s expanding rapidly.
Q6. What tools/tricks do you use when communicating to senior management?
Roger said he has found that gravitating to focus on business value is the most important, while Pieter said that ‘ease of use’ through a simple web-based app is also important.
Audience Polls Results
Darin reported briefly on the audience poll results which highlighted the following:
- Most exciting technology of the week – Field Maps and Pro – which the panel thought reflected the number of people still migrating to Pro and deploying apps to facilitate field-based operations.
- MUG focus going forward – the clear winner was web-based educational meetings – perhaps in the form of continued webinars and short how-to videos...
- Big projects for the next 12 months – Pro Migration, Image Management & Mobility, then Cloud/Kubernetes, AL/ML, etc
Round-Up
Chris and Darin rounded out the meeting by thanking everyone for their attendance and interest, encouraged active participation in the MUG going forward, and promised to get this note out to the MUG Channel on LinkedIn asap.