Hexagon Mining says that a packed MineQuest 2015 programme has continued the momentum built around promotion of its new-generation mining-software products since the start of the year, and in particular the flagship HxM Athena business-intelligence and analytics solution.

Hélio Samora, the new president of the mining arm of Sweden’s Hexagon, told attendees at the MineQuest 2015 global user event in Arizona, US, that the group’s combination of leading industry software developers in recent years had effectively channelled “more than 100 years of combined experience and expertise into a life-of-mine solution”.

“We are integrating products across mine planning, mine operations and mine safety, and making those products easy to buy, implement and support,” said Samora. “Simplicity is at the core of smart change, not just in the elegance of our products, but also in the way we deliver those products to our customers.”

MineQuest, a staple with users of Hexagon Mining’s (former Mintec) MineSight product suite for more than 30 years, now features additional Hexagon Mining technologies, such as the Leica Jigsaw, SmartMine|UG and SAFEmine product suites.

A Hexagon Mining spokesperson states that MineQuest 2015 accelerates the momentum that has been building since Hexagon Mining’s launch earlier this year at the Mining Indaba and SME industry tradeshows. Further instalments of the series will be held in Australia, southern Africa, central and South America, the US and Hong Kong during 2015.

HxM Athena builds on the MineSight Performance Manager (MSPM) product of Mintec, which Hexagon bought last year. At that point, the new owner immediately set about integrating MSPM with the mine fleet-management system technology and know-how that it had obtained via another acquisition, that of Brazil’s Devex, and several other Mintec and Hexagon Mining products. The US-based company Mintec had been in the mining-software business for 40 years and recently hit on the possibilities for realising value out of combining mine productivity, engineering and planning data.

“We now need to connect the design phase and the planning phases in the mining operation with operations, such as fleet management, surveying and so on, so we’re really excited about having MineSight,” Hexagon president Ola Rollén said at the time.

Hexagon Mining has significantly ramped up the product-development and marketing focus for its new vertically integrated mining range, at the same time opening up greater distribution power for the former SafeMine, Devex, Mintec, Jigsaw and Leica product lines that it assembled under the Hexagon Mining banner launched in the US in the middle of last year.

Rollén stated that he wanted to double Hexagon Mining sales of about US$150 million – presumably as quickly as possible, though he, like many others, faces severe market headwinds at present.

Big data

Getting back to the then barely road-mapped HxM Athena, Rollén said that big data was a buzz-phrase for miners as it was for other industries.

“What I do believe in is connectivity. I think that we need to connect planners, operators, executives, maintenance people and so on in the operation of a mine, and I think as you connect them and you bring them together and they all share the same information, that is when you see productivity happening,” Rollén explained. “So whether you call it big data or simply connecting people, I’d prefer to connect people actually.”

MSPM provided a platform for a centralised reporting and an analytical toolset tailored to mining needs. A senior Hexagon Mining product manager says that HxM Athena imports, validates, analyses and stores data from multiple sources, in a single data repository. It then presents the data in dashboard views that are easy to use and understand.

Mark Gabbitus, Hexagon Mining senior product manager – geology and operations, comments: “People still work in site-based silos and don’t think about the cost to the business downstream based on decisions made in their area.

“A classic example is drill and blast. They are expected to get broken dirt ready for mining as quickly and as cheaply as they can. This leads to poor fragmentation, dig rates and mineral recovery costing the business millions. 

“There has always been a lot of data generated in mining, but we are starting to find it is being entered into databases more and more.

“Big data or the data deluge is relatively new to mining, but it has been around for a while in other industries. Essentially, we are now collecting more data than ever before in mining, but we don’t know how to use it. Things like dig-point GPS locations, dig rates, penetration rates from drill rigs, etc, are all now being collected in real time and stored in databases, often totally separate databases owned by different teams.

“Extracting the useful bits of information from this mix of databases is where [HxM Athena] comes in.”

Gabbitus says HxM Athena provides users with both business intelligence and business analytics, and is central to the company’s plans to connect with enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.

HxM Blast, another product getting an official release now, replaces and enhances the functionality of the popular MineSight Blast Pattern Editor, and is aimed at drill-and-blast engineers.

“Future versions will add blasting, tie-in and blast-optimisation features, which will enable operations to blast smarter and more efficiently,” Gabbitus explains.

Other projects

Another Hexagon Mining project that is bubbling away is HxM Live Terrain, said to “assemble other technologies” from Leica equipment to Intergraph software and combine them with data “truthing” and processing software to build a database of all relevant data, ranked by fidelity. Users will be able to select an area for which they need the latest terrain surface, and HxM Live Terrain “will deliver it”.

This is seen to offer a much-needed tool for rationalising a vital mine data source – the topography surface as it is continually measured and mined – potentially producing benefits in work areas ranging from mine planning and fleet management to environment and slope monitoring, reconciliation, autonomous mining and regulatory compliance.

Smooth integration of the different Hexagon Mining software lines has been helped by painless joining of the different technology businesses.

“There were a lot of pieces and people to bring together,” Gabbitus says. “Each company before the integration had its own priorities, so we’ve had to work through various requirements and make sure we’re all ready to roll. It’s actually been really collaborative – possibly more than at other companies.

“Everyone we talk to [in the market], they’re all [talking] about process improvement and cost reductions, and really that’s what Athena and Blast were developed to address. We’re trying to help mining companies do things smarter, better and cheaper, and helping them identify where they’ve got problems in their mining process.”