NETWORKS AND COMMUNICATIONS
In March this year, Sandvik Mining and Rock
Technology today announced an agreement
with IBM to jointly develop market leading
offerings in Data Driven Productivity and
Predictive Maintenance services for the mining
and rock excavation industry
industry. Under the agreement, Sandvik and IBM
will develop advanced analytics solutions to
improve safety, maintenance, productivity and
operational services of mining and rock
excavation equipment.
“The growth in onboard instrumentation and
data gathering capabilities in heavy equipment
are presenting natural resource industries with
opportunities to employ advanced analytics and
models to identify and resolve productivity issues
and improve process optimisation and
performance. Deployment of digital technologies
are expected to create as much as $100 billion
value to resource producing companies by 2035.”
“As two global leaders – Sandvik and IBM will
be working together to make a clear difference in
productivity improvements in mining and rock
excavation companies globally. A Memorandum
of Understanding has been signed with the intent
to create market leading offerings in data driven
productivity and predictive maintenance
solutions. The two companies are already
working jointly with selected customers to pilot
the concept and commercialise specific solutions.
The first wave of work will be done on loaders
and trucks, connecting up to 15 units and
integrating live data from multiple on- and off
board systems to run the analytic algorithms.
The IBM-Sandvik collaboration will involve
the use of advanced analytics, remote
monitoring and cognitive technologies to allow
natural resource companies to combine
equipment and application data from disparate
resources and automatically analyse patterns in
the data to improve performance and productivity.
“This combination of information services,
remote data collection and data analysis will enable
increased effectiveness by increasing productivity,
saving cost and reducing time wastage. It helps
mining and rock excavation companies make well-
informed decisions regarding production plans and
maintenance schedules and provides the
opportunity to monitor and improve upon the
general utilisation levels of their equipment. This
will lead to higher yield at lower cost of ore per
tonne. Sandvik have already seen cost per tonne
decreases of 20-50% with some of the latest digital
technologies and with this new analytical capability
aim to push that even further.”
“Sandvik has been working with mining
customers on mine automation and remote
monitoring of machines for more than 20 years.
Our OptiMine ® and AutoMine ® solutions are also
important systems for data collection and
consolidation that provide us with a great
platform to get a flying start with IBM analytics
solutions. So it is a natural step for us to
collaborate with a company like IBM – experts in
advanced analytics cognitive computing and
modeling – to create even m