For General Electric mining's future is digital

General Electric's mining division is betting on mining's growing need for all things digital.

MINING.com spoke to Vice President and Global Mining Leader, Scott Phillips, at MINExpo is September.

"We have had great success in two or three mining customers operations which were actually improved through the use of digital capabilities," says Phillips.

"We’ve been able to get at the ore and the amount of ore that is extracted relative to the overall tonnes of rocks that were extracted."

Phillips sees a great opportunity in the years ahead.

"If you look across the top 40 mines, if we can even just get 1%—which we’ve seen we’ve been able to do at a few assets—that would be worth a $5 billion savings to that group of customers, so we think this could be potentially game changing for the customers.

Interview is edited for clarity:

MINING.com: What are some of GE's applications in digital mining?

Scott Phillips: In digital mining our objective is to fully allow the customer to have intelligence about what’s going on in the ore body and what’s going on in the assets. Within the asset performance management, operations optimizer, and the third product is digital thread, we call those our “killer apps,” and those killer apps all plug into our industrial operating system, the world’s first, purpose-built for industrial applications, internet of things operating system.

I think this will differentiate our ability to drive transformative outcomes for our customers.

MINING.com: Are there new sensors that are getting attached to systems?

Scott Phillips: This will be the software that then enables the information from our sensors to actually be used, packaged into analytics, repackaged together in terms of products that are going to allow our customers to better know what’s going on in their operations and then allow them to optimize their assets, as well as processes.

MINING.com: What are customers seeing from the implementation of digital?

Scott Phillips: Our customers are absolutely getting it. They are focused on three areas, one of them being the products and technologies that are going to drive transformative outcomes in safety, so our collision avoidance system is a good example, we have had great successes there. Another area is how do we gain productivity, so it’s our asset performance manager or APM is significantly driving productivity gains not only in this industry but in other industries that we serve as well.

MINING.com: Can you provide more examples of miners using digital?

Scott Phillips: We have had great success in two or three mining customers operations where we’ve actually through the use of digital capabilities. We’ve been able to get at the ore and the amount of ore that is extracted relative to the overall tonnes of rocks that were extracted, all the way through to the processing operation where we’ve been able to drive better quality ore bodies to the smelter and, as a consequence, we’ve been able to help our customers realize the significant improvement in the ore recovery rates, which is a key driver to the mining economics.

And, in fact, if you look across the top 40 mines, if we can even just get 1%, which we’ve seen we’ve been able to do at a few assets, that would be worth a $5 billion savings to that group of customers, so we think this could be potentially game changing for the customers.

MINING.com: Can you see some areas where digital is taking over?

Scott Phillips: Both in terms of surface mining and underground mining you are increasingly seeing operations that are more and more employing digital applications, whether it is to improve operations or to move to fully automated suites, absolutely, I’ve seen a lot of movement towards that in the last couple of years.

MINING.com: Where do you see this trend going?

Scott Phillips: The focus is how do we bring together new technologies within our customers' operations to, again, focus on how do we transform safety, and how do we unlock the productivity potential that our customers are looking for.

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