CAT and Orica take on workflow optimisation

Caterpillar and Orica are teaming up to improve real-time data exchange and integrate workflows across the mining value chain.

The collaboration is aimed at providing customers with intelligence to improve decision-making and optimise their entire operations.

“Our customers are looking for every opportunity to optimise the productivity and safety of their mining and processing operations,” CAT technology and global sales support vice president Sean McGinnis said.

“By combining and leveraging the insights unlocked by Orica and Caterpillar’s technologies, we will be able to provide customers greater access and visibility to the data and information they need to make better, real-time business decisions.”

The initial focus will be on the potential integration between Orica’s Rhino, BlastIQ and FRAGTrack technologies with CAT MineStar Terrain.

The goal is to provide customers with high-fidelity rock property information and enable improvements to on-bench safety, drilling and blasting program accuracy and productivity, along with higher quality blast outcomes that generate enhanced mill performance.

“The mining industry requires greater collaboration amongst its leading technology players to build connected workflows across different domains to address the current issue of value-leakage arising from traditional and disconnected silos,” Orica digital solutions vice president Rajkumar Mathiravedu said.

“Collaborative end-to-end ecosystems are critical to harnessing the full potential of advances in sensors, data processing and intelligence to enable the development of safer, more sustainable, and productive methods of resource recovery.”

In the future, the two companies intend to extend their collaboration to optimisation of the entire value chain, from mine to mill.

Orica said the mining industry has started to unlock the potential of workflow optimisation, and the collaboration intends to take it to the next level.

“To realise the full potential across the entire value chain, technology domain leaders, customers, and academia need to increase collaboration in an open ecosystem to develop integrated, end-to-end operational workflows which link orebody intelligence, drilling and blasting, material characterisation and processing,” Orica said.

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