RPM said the current focus of development for its ID solution is not on replacing the various third-party mine design solutions on the market; instead, RPM's focus has been to build on the experience from its consulting and advisory businesses in order to produce an agile solution to support rapid scenario generation and optimal mine design decision-making.

RPM's CEO and managing director Richard Mathews said: "A lot of the products currently available in the market are based upon 30-year-old principles and the same underlying code base which has been adapted, reformed, tailored and customised over the years.

"Our approach to this new intelligent design solution is to start with a clean slate and build a solution utilising the latest enterprise architecture and technologies."

Up until now, RPM had chosen not to develop its own mine design software and was focused on ‘open integration' with other third-party design applications.

"This approach was built on the assumption that third-party vendors would allow the free flow of data between applications and across the enterprise," Mathews said.

"The catalyst for RPM building its own design solution has been driven by the realisation that other suppliers to the industry have inherent limitations around enterprise interoperability.

"Furthermore, as the engineering process ‘starts with design', a comprehensive RPM suite of planning products needs to include intelligent design solutions in order to round-out RPM's established suite of integrated solutions."

He also explained that as RPM has been a data consumer of established third-party mine design product vendors, it has a good understating of the key "pain points" that mining engineers face in traditional mine design.

"Our goal with this new product suite is to address these key issues in a user-friendly and technically advanced manner. We will, of course, continue to work closely with the established third-party mine design software vendors and promote open standards with the intent of offering mining companies a real choice in a plug-and-play enterprise environment," he added.

With its Enterprise Planning Framework, RPM already has the needed architecture, as well as the required functionality from the acquisition of the rights to use the Mine 2-4D solution.

RPM said its intention is to now work with the industry to build an enterprise application that is open, interoperable and will harnesses the latest technologies, bringing everything together into an enterprise, commercial-off-the-shelf product.