5 Ways Grid Can Supercharge The Mining Industry

Mining and Mineral Exploration has always been perceived as an industry that's primarily dependent on manual labor.

Contrary to popular opinion, though, the mining industry is, in fact, witnessing a digital transformation, with companies welcoming digital technologies and automation. Mining 4.0, as experts call it, is defined by smart equipment, data-driven decisions, interconnected centralized systems, and an emphasis on efficiency.

For quite some time, the mining industry has incurred steady productivity declines, but this trend is gradually being reversed with the adoption of digitization in the industry. Mining companies are increasingly focusing on minimizing operating costs and unplanned downtime, with data providing invaluable insights into addressing gaps.

By digitizing process workflows, the industry can diminish the ever-present danger of human error while also transforming traditional channels into end-to-end systems that coordinate in real-time. This way, business decision-makers can obtain a holistic view of the daily operations at multiple mining sites and take effective actions ahead of time. It's essential that the mining industry fully capitalizes on cutting-edge technology, and with Grid's no-code tools, companies can stay ahead of their competition by automating their workflows with unlimited personalization. Business heads can translate strategy into fully functioning applications within an hour, without depending on external technical resources, thus gaining autonomous control over monitoring all processes within their organization.

While all mining and mineral exploration companies are unique, there are many common processes that they follow - here are five examples of these processes that can be automated or enhanced using Grid's No Code for Enterprise product:

Compliance Management System

Mining and Mineral Exploration is one of the most heavily regulated industries in the world and these compliances keep evolving rapidly. With this in mind, companies need to keep their process assessment up to date or incur the possibility of heavy fines, loss of certification, or irrefutable harm to the business. To ensure that human error doesn't get in the way of proactive compliance management, this process needs to be completely automated.

Grid helps you aggregate multiple assessment workflows onto one single platform, with end-to-end flexibility and unlimited customization to suit your unique business landscape. With Grid, Site Managers can stay updated round the clock with regular updates and alerts, and remain ready to take preemptive measures. For business heads, Grid's holistic analytics and centralized dashboards provide actionable insights into how existing processes can be improved or reworked per the latest regulations.

Inspection Checklist

Running a mining and exploration business at high efficiency is an arduous task because not only do you need to be on top of maintaining smooth process completion every second, but also remain alert to the possibility of high-level problems that can bring operations to a standstill.

Problems, especially those relating to on-site safety, pose a huge risk of downtime resulting in losses, along with legal consequences, which is the last thing any business needs. Or the mismanagement of wastewater discharge, that could violate critical EHS rules, thus resulting in non-compliance. Inspections are hence carried out regularly to make sure compliance standards are met without fault.

This requires a lot of time and manual effort that can be transformed with Grid's mobile application. Site managers can effortlessly update standardized checklists in minutes, and send reports to a centralized database, where these checklists will regularly be assessed and audited by the designated personnel in real-time. Workers can also stay fully informed of the regulations binding different processes through the Grid mobile application, and aid in risk mitigation and proactive EHS management.

Tenement Management System

Grid simplifies the complex task of handling the reporting, renewal, payment, and other obligations to ensure your mining tenements stay up to date. Heads of businesses can finally cross tenement administration off the list of things to worry about. Grid captures all data related to your tenements, licenses, and leases, wherever they may be located, and provides detailed reports along with automated alerts for any required actions.

Growing businesses face the challenge of streamlining tenement management across multiple jurisdictions with varying degrees of obligations to be fulfilled. With the flexibility of our no-code platform, tenement managers can use one of our many templates or build their administrative interface within an hour. Leave the maintenance and the timely checks to the application, while you and your team can focus on strategy and business outcomes.

Timesheet Monitoring

Timesheets are a very essential mechanism that decision-makers can use to assess productivity. But the issue with traditional timesheets, despite all the valuable insight that can be extracted from them, is that both paper-based timesheets as well as digital spreadsheets built on Excel / Google Sheets are inefficient and vulnerable to the possibility of mismanagement. By the time the data on these timesheets have been analyzed, the value of the data is lost and management gets a less transparent picture of actual operations.

With Grid's Timesheet Monitoring system, the whole process becomes automatic, allowing decision-makers full access to historic and real-time insights into timesheet data as the end-user inputs it into Grid's mobile app, eliminating any unnecessary channels that this data has to go through. With these insights, management can isolate gaps in the underutilization of their workforce or processes that could be amped with redistribution in the quality or quantity of personnel. Grid's Timesheet Monitoring System can also break down different crews' productivity graphs and labor costs in one click, enabling supervisors to take necessary actions.

Vehicle Management System

In the process of digitizing multiple processes, one crucial operation that might be overlooked is vehicle management. The Mining and Mineral Exploration industry requires fleets of vehicles that have an integral impact on daily productivity. Fleet managers are assigned the task of supervising and monitoring the smooth functioning of the fleet while maintaining cost-effectiveness.

But with a multitude of variables that need to be tracked, spread across a large number of vehicles, this process can turn into a very complex task that, when poorly managed, can cause severe operational losses. The obvious solution here is a digital platform that aggregates all these variables and factors, and drastically elevates the visibility of blockers. With Grid, you can create this digital platform and even take it one step further, by empowering fleet managers to personalize their own intelligent dashboards as per their requirements.

This includes measuring critical KPIs of fuel efficiency optimization, asset health and safety management, compliance monitoring, or optimizing fleet utilization. For example, by enabling operators to easily make a record of each time a vehicle is refueled, a fuel consumption pattern can be established that can inform managers not only of historical fuel consumption but also enable them to predict and plan future consumption. This would allow your company to better plan its fuel procurement, leading to a reduction in storage fees, a more efficient just-in-time ordering system, and can even highlight any anomalies in consumption that might be caused by wastage or pilfering. Grid also provides you the flexibility to collaborate with multiple decision-makers from anywhere thus helping you automate fleet operational workflows across multiple mining sites from the comfort of your office.