"The entire industry is heading in the direction of guided workflows and data management." - Russell Vance, Regional Manager - North America, Deswik
How does Deswik serve Ontario’s mining industry?
Deswik is a global company that delivers engineering efficiency to the mining industry through customized software, consulting and training solutions. We are a team of mine planners that build mine planning software, empowering mining professionals to work smarter and faster, consequently driving down costs and increasing asset value.
The company has seen tremendous growth since its establishment, employing more than 400 people globally, and having a user base of approximately 25,000 licenses at 900 operations worldwide. In 2023, we acquired Polymathian Industrial Mathematics, an advanced provider of mine optimization software. Sudbury is our largest office in North America, with a team of approximately 20 engineers and consultants. We serve the majority of Ontario’s mining market, with almost all underground hard rock mines in the region using our solutions in some way.
Which of Deswik’s solutions is garnering the most attention from Ontario’s mining market?
Data management is becoming a bigger conversation, and we are engaging with many customers about our mining database management tool, Deswik.MDM, which enables standardization, one version of the truth, and mine planning efficiency. The entire industry is heading in the direction of guided workflows and data management.
The short interval control (SIC) space is also receiving significant attention. Operators are ensuring they have access to real-time data in the control room and on mobile devices, instead of waiting for information to flow up to a control room at the end of shift. In underground mines specifically, SIC is a great opportunity to add more value and efficiency, and our operations planning and control solution, Deswik.Ops, enables this through collaborative short-term operations planning and shift execution, activity monitoring, schedule integration, and management of compliance to plan. We are experiencing significant demand for this product, with some customers reporting up to 10% improvement in the efficiency of their operations.
We are also seeing great demand for automated decision-making solutions, and our ORB operations and dispatch software from Polymathian allows for automated equipment scheduling and dispatching.
Can you comment on Deswik’s approach to R&D, and is the company incorporating AI into its solutions?
Deswik has a culture of innovation, and approximately 34% of the company’s turnover from our software solutions is invested back into R&D projects. This translates to about 40% of our developers’ time spent on innovation and enhancements. We added approximately 300 developments and enhanced functionalities to our existing product base in 2023.
Deswik is focusing its innovation on open-pit planning tools and making them more usable. We are also looking at the optimization engines we have through Polymathian and evaluating where we can integrate them into our other tools to automate and improve the decision-making process.
Under Sandvik, Deswik forms part of the Digital Mining Technologies division (Digitec) which focuses on the automation and optimization of mining equipment and operations. Sandvik Digitec brings together the strengths of Deswik’s mine planning solutions, Sandvik’s automated equipment, Newtrax’s collision avoidance technology, and Polymathian’s mine optimization software to contribute to creating the mines of the future.
On the topic of AI, our developers can use AI to improve their productivity, but the challenge with this is data security; we cannot put our code base into a public AI database like ChatGPT. Another opportunity is utilizing AI in mine planning to predict mine design steps based on historical commands, prompting the user to follow a certain workflow that was taken in the past and thus making the planning process quicker. AI can also potentially be leveraged to solve mine planning problems, for instance, by having the AI look at topography and auto-determining all the haul network options instantaneously. A key challenge is that AI requires substantial datasets for training, however not all of our clients are willing to share their data. We are still figuring out how to overcome data security issues when leveraging AI.
What are Deswik’s key priorities and growth strategy moving forward?
Deswik will continue along the data management journey with our clients and will persist in improving data integrity with our Deswik.MDM solution. We will also keep working to grow our footprint in the SIC space, and are staffing up to continue to deliver in this area with our OPS product.
Read Russell's interview on Global Business Reports: https://www.gbreports.com/interview/russell-vance