The Digital Mine Today

The Spruce Data Group partnered with a top gold mining company to create an effective and efficient big data platform capable of supporting the needs of a global enterprise.

As one of the top gold mining companies on the planet, our client needed a data aggregation and distribution system that served their unique needs. With sixteen operating sites in thirteen countries, they needed a structure to relay the relevant data across borders and time zones throughout the day and night. Spruce collaborated directly with the client’s stakeholders and subject matter experts to carefully define assets and specifications for the models. The Spruce team enriched and enhanced the model with consumable ingredient values, time attributes, raw material refinement process meta-tags, derived asset values, machine wear assumptions, human resource variables, and other core processing inputs.

The gold refinement process is heavily dependent on precision and accuracy both in its actual extraction process and the post-extraction processing mechanisms. Keeping this in mind, Spruce’s design prioritized the effective management of each aspect of refinement, both individually and as components of a larger system. To ensure data immediacy and real-time availability, the Spruce team also implemented Hadoop clusters with Hive, and Spark on Python, allowing us to break processes into highly granular partitions and take maximum advantage of the AWS Terraform, Serverless framework and AWS CloudFormation.

The framework built by Spruce equipped our client to efficiently organize work processes far beyond the mines. Our platform’s additional applications include shop floor management, machine learning, preventative maintenance, executive decision support, and more. During the lifecycle of this engagement, Spruce provided nearly three dozen hard-to-find resources in cutting-edge technologies for the organization’s campuses across North America. This collection of senior-level architects, developers, and specialists helped to support our client’s comprehensive digital transformation efforts, with skills in areas such as big data analytics, data virtualization, machine learning, full stack development and cloud engineering.

 

Challenge

To maximize efficiency and identify pain points, the client needed a real-time view of its data; with mining sites in disparate locations across the world, getting this incoming information in sync had proven to be a challenge. The goal for Spruce was to create a mechanism for the client to be able to view, interact with, and mobilize their real-time information, including extraction rate, value, transportation, and scheduling data in order to enable better strategic decisions and maximize productivity.

Solution

Spruce successfully created for the client the largest data integration platform in the gold mining industry, a significant improvement over the system previously in use. By leveraging AWS cloud services, the multidimensional solution pulls data from mines across multiple continents in real time, enriching it through clustered in-memory parallel processing and preparing it for use. Spruce’s AI model and Tableau business intelligence dashboards consume the prepared data and ready it for use by the client’s executives and mining operators, enabling critical decision making and calculated advancement based on real-time information.

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