Centric Mining introduces Scio
A new software product designed for the mining industry is using production data to help companies make strategic business decisions, improving efficiency and visibility.
Scio (pronounced “SEE-oh”), designed by Sudbury-based Centric Mining Systems, gathers performance data gleaned from mining operations, and interprets the information to highlight any correlations it finds.
Centric founder and CEO Chris Novak said the product has been in the works for about a year. The mining industry is notorious for doing a terrible job at using data in an advantageous way, he said. The introduction of Scio aims to change that.
“The mining industry is really good at proactively using financial data, but always reactive in terms of looking at the actual activities going on around ore tracking,” Novak said.
Centric has, for years, been gathering data for everything from the movement of ore to generating production reconciliation reports. Scio is designed to operate in tandem with Centric, but can also be used on its own.
The idea behind using data to make business decisions isn’t a new one. Companies have been using it for years, but information has typically been gathered piecemeal, turned into graphs and charts, and that’s where its efficacy ended, Novak said.
“They could create a pretty picture, but they really still didn’t understand the data they had,” he said. Scio takes the interpretation of that data one step further by finding relationships amongst the numbers that can be used by the companies to make strategic business decisions.
For example, Scio can examine the relationship between workforce size and safety, or production rates and environmental occurrences.
It can demonstrate how well the company is producing, how well its resource models are performing, and how well it’s delivering product to the market. It also connects seamlessly with Centric’s core product, which makes Scio stand out amongst its competitors.
“Because our core system is designed to house all these metrics — resource models, mining activities, consumables, drill and blast — it gives us the ability to make Scio smart and look at that data and automatically come up with scenarios that the business is going to get value from,” Novak said. “That is unique.”
In an industry that has been traditionally slow at responding to data, sometimes waiting days or weeks to release that information, this provides an instant snapshot of how the business is performing and how certain factors play into each other.
“The business is completely empowered instead of waiting to react and waiting for people to glue things together,” Novak said. “Our Centric product, with this new product, Scio, gives the decision- maker the ability to act immediately, rather than sit around and wait.”
It can also add a layer of visibility across the company. The information can be transmitted and displayed to workers in a meeting room, engineers in the bull pen, or executives in the boardroom, all in real time, Novak said.
By using data to make strategic production decisions, Novak believes companies can actually make incremental improvements that will enhance productivity by anywhere from two to four per cent.
Scio is being rolled out in stages. It was piloted by a selection of Centric’s existing clients earlier this year, then made available to a broader base of clients in November. Scio is scheduled for release to the rest of the market by the end of the year.
