Particularly for junior explorers and services to mining companies, cutting unnecessary expenditure is key to sustainable operations and a healthy bottom line.

While searching for ways to cut costs used to be a tedious task, technology is now making it easier than ever before.Particularly for junior explorers and services to mining companies, cutting unnecessary expenditure is key to sustainable operations and a healthy bottom line. While searching for ways to cut costs used to be a tedious task, technology is now making it easier than ever before.

Advancing capabilities in automation and artificial intelligence are enabling businesses to streamline manual, repetitive tasks – and perhaps no area is as perfect for this as the IT department.

IT staff are notoriously burdened with low-level, time-consuming activities which take their attention away from driving improvements and innovation to support the business as a whole.

For a mining company’s IT department, these monotonous activities can be found within IT corporate operations, process control (pit or plant), security, and transport and logistics.

Why should mining companies automate IT activities?

There are many proven benefits to automation, such as its ability to:automating IT activities for mining companies

  • Optimise IT operations and development processes
  • Improve agility and responsiveness
  • Drive staff productivity
  • Eliminate manual error
  • Allow higher cost resources to focus on value-add tasks
  • Increase availability and uptime of IT services
  • Uplift security and compliance

Ultimately, automation empowers you to lower the cost of delivery and improve efficiency in your business. This translates into healthier profits, a better customer experience, and a more positive and productive workplace for staff.

What activities can be automated?

Ideally, you want to automate any task that would enable your people to click a button and get on with their day – instead of spending hours fiddling with software or hardware to achieve a simple outcome.

In the mining sector, this could be readying devices for new staff so they have access to everything needed on their first day. It could be automating break fix configurations for machinery, so staff do not need to travel to site and complete the repair manually. It could be automating security such as CCTV cameras with remote management capabilities. Or, it could be automating network systems to scale up and down to cater for peak periods.

The opportunities are endless, however it’s important to have a practical strategy before you begin. You’ll see a faster return on investment if you tackle low hanging fruit first, which are your most repetitive and low value activities that are already ripe for automation.

An automation specialist can help you prioritise automation opportunities, and show you how much time, effort and money may be saved by having machines do the work for you.

How do we get started with automation?Find out how to boost your mining company’s IT department with automation. Read about the many proven benefits here.

RSM has extensive experience working with mining and services to mining companies to deliver well-planned automation strategies and solutions that deliver real results.

We start with a deep dive into your IT department’s processes, key pain points and current platforms, before putting forward prioritised recommendations for areas that we believe will offer the best ROI once they are automated.

Collaborating with your IT team, we can then design workflows and deploy a full automation capability that leverages the latest technologies with minimal disruption to your business.

For more information

To find out how RSM’s IT experts can help your mining company reap the benefits of automation, contact our Managed IT Services division.

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