What is a Mine of the Future?

What is a Mine of the Future?

Definition

A Mine of the Future is a multi-horizon vision of an end-point: the operating, business and organizational model that an asset or enterprise is working toward, expressed concretely enough to guide the choices being made today.

It is more than a rendering of selected technology at work. It answers three questions annual planning cannot:

1. What would have to be true of the operation in ten to twenty years?
2. What tradeoffs are required to make that future possible?
3. How and where does it tangibly create value?

In more than 70 technology visions, strategies and roadmaps in mining, we have seen the same two things separate the visions that get funded from the ones that get shelved. The first is a shared view of value: what the vision delivers against corporate strategic and operating goals, grounded bottom-up in the needs of the business. The second is a goal: a defined end-point operating, business or organizational model, which gives technology roadmapping and investment a direction from the top down.

Between the two sit the intermediate horizons, where the one-to-four-year initiatives a company can name today have to connect to a future it can only anticipate. That is where most technology programs break down, and it is what we design a vision to hold together.

What the visions that get funded have in common

Every vision we build is different. The ones that go on to change how capital is allocated share the same characteristics.

1. 1

   Multiple horizons

   The vision defines what the operation will look like across appropriate horizons, for example 5, 15 and 25 years. It forms a path from the present along a roadmap, and it explores the available, the emerging and the conceptual. Each horizon is made as tangible as possible across the operating model.

2. 2

   Metrics driven

   Visions should be inspiring, but also actionable and attainable. Where a strategy and targets exist, whether social, environmental, operational or financial, the question becomes: what performance would have to be true of this asset to achieve our goals? The answers become multi-horizon objectives that management and operations can rally around.

3. 3

   Integrated and systemic

   We design the whole system, not around a favorite vendor or technology. It is easy to rank autonomous haulage or ore sorting on a top-ten list. It is harder, and more useful, to ask how they work together as a system. Ore sorting may make sense in isolation, but if neither the shaft nor the mill can take advantage of it, the effort is wasted.

4. 4

   Tradeoff based

   A good vision is a strategy. It sets out what the asset will stop doing as well as what it will do. Freeing up old resources matters as much as directing new ones, and a systems view may prioritize differently from a process view. Most companies avoid this step because giving up desired work is painful, but it is the difference between focus and overload.

5. 5

   Capabilities based

   In mining, a future vision cannot be separated from the operating model or the human and technological capabilities it requires. A good vision explores the impact of the future state on these and identifies the gaps early. The capabilities, systems and processes of digital, operations and procurement are often what decide success.

A Storytelling Vision may not need all of this at first. Once executives have made promises about the future, though, these become the critical path to keeping them.

Selected cases

Select a case to read the challenge, approach and outcome in full.

All Mine of the Future case studies