Brennan is helping mining companies enhance decision-making through its data and AI offerings.
It’s one thing for a mining company to have a wealth of data. But understanding and interpreting that data to achieve key project objectives is a different ballgame entirely.
It’s a situation Brennan understands very well.
With over 27 years of IT experience, Brennan is among Australia’s leading and most trusted systems integrators.
“Key for us is understanding what a company’s objectives are first, then using technology to facilitate those goals,” Brennan Digital director Mal Shafi told Australian Mining.
“In this tight, constrained economy, technological initiatives have to move the business forward while making a return on investment. And that’s what we do.”
One of Brennan’s key portfolios is data, comprising of an extensive range of services and solutions to designed help organisations flourish.
With the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI), data has quickly become an area of increased focus.
One key example is where Brennan is enhancing resource optimisation on mine sites by using Azure AI, a platform within Microsoft Azure.
“By looking at the large scale of mining, we analyse data from multiple sources to provide a single comprehensive view,” Shafi said.
“From there, mining companies can enhance decision-making around resource allocation, optimising machinery usage, labour and raw materials to avoid downtime and unnecessary spend.
“As one of Australia’s leading Microsoft partners, we use Azure to automate tasks like equipment monitoring and maintenance schedules. This means we can reduce equipment downtime and operational costs through predictive maintenance.
“Using data to predictably, rather than reactively, enhance operations saves time and money in the long term.”
Brennan’s support of AI solutions harnesses and optimises data to identify and analyse potential hazards so companies can ensure they are complying with workplace safety and environmental regulations.
“We can use Azure to improve geological data analysis to enrich exploration by identifying promising drilling areas, increasing the likelihood of discovering new deposits and optimising production planning,” Shafi said.
“An old friend of mine is a geologist and they spend so much time in remote parts of the world collecting huge tranches of data and research to find the next productive mining spots.”
“But if you automate that, you’ll save time and won’t impact the ground as much because identifying higher-yielding drill spots are tailored.”
Brennan is deeply embedded in the Microsoft ecosystem, allowing it to deliver unified, scalable and highly efficient platforms tailored to specific customer needs.
“To ensure ease-of-use and immediate value, Brennan has developed Quick Starts, pre-packaged, fixed-price and fixed-outcome solutions that can be rapidly deployed,” Shafi said.
Brennan’s data portfolio has many success stories. One case study involved Brennan building a predictive maintenance solution to predict the lifespan of a company’s critical assets.
“We have also managed data estates for mining companies by right-sizing and orchestrating the data to ensure its optimised,” Shafi said.
“Previously, people would spend significant chunks of time carrying out database management; by automating that process, those people are able to focus more on business-lead activities. Customer feedback has told us it’s the equivalent of gaining extra headcount.”
Brennan prides itself on improvement and modernisation, ensuring each digital solution it designs, builds and deploys is right for its customers.
“This proactive approach allows us to remain connected with our customers to meet their evolving requirements,” Shafi said. “One of the things they appreciate is our transparency, as well as our ability to look at trending data and go, ‘Hey, this is a common problem in the market. How can we improve it?’
“Brennan wants to be a strategic partner. For every project, our goal is to deliver the outcomes our customers want, providing them with real value.”
This feature appeared in the July 2024 issue of Australian Mining.
