Australian open-pit solutions specialist MaxMine shortens mining performance analysis by 80% with 8 million hours of operational data.
MaxMine has chosen Snowflake to help mine sites become more efficient, safer and environmentally sustainable as customers race to achieve net zero by 2050.
MaxMine customers include listed multinational mining companies and leading local operators in Australia and globally, such as NRW Holdings, Macmahon, First Quantum Minerals and Kinross Gold
Under the collaboration, Snowflake’s single, integrated platform will manage more than 25 Terabytes of MaxMine’s operational data from its mining clients, providing high-quality data and near real time analysis to help mining supervisors and operators, including those in remote locations, improve equipment lifespan, optimise their operations, make informed decisions faster and deliver operational changes in their sites.
By leveraging the Snowflake Data Cloud, MaxMine continues to build out its core product analytics capability, creating large critical data sets in running complex and large-scale queries on regular schedules.
The Snowflake Data Cloud will equip the company’s customer-facing business intelligence and product development teams to decouple their workloads to maximise value to our customers.
As the world heads towards 2050 net zero goals, the mining industry is under pressure to increase production.
To help build cleaner energy solutions such as solar, wind and water, the mining industry will need to mine six times more metals than today, according to the International Energy Agency.
At the same time, the industry faces new sustainability requirements.
Tom Cawley, Executive Chair and Interim CEO, MaxMine, says the average open pit mine can reduce Scope 1 emissions by up to 10-15% by leveraging data.
“MaxMine employs data enabling the average open pit mine to improve productivity whilst also reducing its carbon footprint by around 15-20,000 tonnes of CO2. At the same time, MaxMine’s safety solutions use data to determine incident causes and opportunities to improve truck operator behaviour.
“Huge amounts of data are vital to our Mining Done Different mission, so we needed a partner of Snowflake’s calibre. With Snowflake, we are able to derive greater value and deliver tangible benefits to our customers, supporting them and accelerating their decarbonisation journey.”
Ben Chartier, Head of Product Development, MaxMine, says Snowflake was chosen after an extensive and in-depth review of modern cloud data technologies balanced up the technical and business needs for the MaxMine product.
“We were impressed with Snowflake’s approach to decoupling compute and storage from the underlying data technology. With Snowflake, we were able to get a technical proof of concept up and running in a week and so were able to demonstrate a meaningful capability uplift with a short time to value.
“Working with the Snowflake team is just as good as the Snowflake technology. The technical and account teams are always available and willing to lend a hand to help us overcome specific problems as they arise.”
Theo Hourmouzis, Regional Vice President, Snowflake Australia and New Zealand, said: “Data plays an ever increasing and pivotal role in delivering a sustainable future. Snowflake looks forward to the continued collaboration with MaxMine, using data as the Driving force, leveraging advanced analytics, Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, enabling more mining operators globally to improve efficiency and achieve their Net Zero goals.”
We asked MaxMine Interim CEO and Exec Chair Tom Cawley for more.
From an operational perspective, what are the medium-to-long-term advantages for MaxMine transitioning with Snowflake?
Having all our data in one place means we can join disparate datasets together and deliver even more insights to our customers, whether internal teams or end-users. The Snowflake Data Cloud enables easy and seamless integration into our Business Intelligence (BI) tool of choice, equipping our operational and client-facing teams with the ability to pull together the visualisations they seek. We are putting the technology and data in the hands of our client-facing teams that own those problems.
Our client-facing teams were keen to track our customers’ long-term improvements using more operational data that we have stored in disparate data systems. Now, our teams have developed standardised data models for common use cases. They can use these models in a self-serve ad hoc analysis and simple BI use cases, unlocking the power of the data that we have.
We are excited to bring together the best data sets in the surface mining market. There is a wealth of untapped potential in making informed decisions backed by high-quality evidence. By leveraging a data cloud solution, we can solve problems at scale with greater speed and flexibility.
How were the technical aspects of those advantages communicated to MaxMine’s operational teams?
We use Snowflake Data Cloud as a core part of our product offering to enable long-period analysis of our rich operational mining datasets. With the help of convenient plug-ins, we unlock the full power of the BI tools we use, both for our product development and client-facing teams.
From a technical perspective, our engineers work seamlessly with the technology which equips us to build an impressive data capability with a relatively small engineering team. Snowflake has been really easy to work with, which eliminated the need for an additional ‘systems integration’ team to facilitate our transition to using Snowflake.
What positives can be taken from working with the Snowflake team towards the transition?
The Snowflake team has been very supportive of helping us get up and going with their product. Snowflake’s technical sales and account management team has been super proactive in helping MaxMine with the technical implementation of solutions and connecting us with other people working around their data ecosystem. When selecting Snowflake, you aren’t only integrating their technology but also buying into an ecosystem that works together to solve your end-to-end problems.
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