In today’s competitive landscape, comprehensive data strategies have become critical for every sector to shoulder new ventures and multiply territorial operations. Of particular focus, sectors like mining need a mechanism for tracking geographical parameters to accurately analyze, explore and monitor a project surface and its mined landscape. Similar sectors like the utilities require exposure to field data associated to assets, for conducting routine tasks like inspection, maintenance, restoration, and more, in a timely fashion. Ergo, both sectors have become increasingly dependent on spatial data to cover these facets of their business.
However, legacy systems deter enterprises of this nature from turning data into actionable insights that are critical to decision-making. There is a need for, a unified, centralized, and customized solution with visualization, analytics, and cloud to derive real-time insights from spatial data. Let us take a closer look at the potential that spatial data holds for the utilities and mining sectors when unlocked in the proper manner.
The demand for geo-enabled devices and applications will increase manifold, making the convergence of spatial data with emerging technologies like AI/ML, cloud, and IoT, a prerequisite.
Powering transformation in engineering utilities workflows
Like any other industry, in the utilities sector, the consumer is at the core of operations. This customer population continuously translocates and grows, impacting the environment and how businesses and communities function. Utilities need contextual and situational awareness of the changes that abound in order to predict and mitigate problems with actionable intelligence. By combining geospatial data with the right kind of digital technology, utilities can enable visualization capabilities and make smarter decisions in the areas of asset management on field, outages, workforce distribution, network compliance, infrastructure protection, and more.
Moreover, with digital transformation picking up at a competitive pace, geo-enabling utilities’ networks have become the need of the hour. Utilities must capture, store, analyze, and present real-time spatial data from siloed sources. Especially in the event of disruptions such as the increasing demand for data and services, transmission losses, or fluctuations in the demand for water/gas/electricity, cast against aging infrastructure, deploying an end-to-end management solution that provides a unified view of utilities’ networks, workflows, and associated assets to manage consumer expectations is essential. Here, geo-enabled applications can help realize significant operational improvements, from reduced distribution losses and downtime to community development.
Expediting precise mine plans, maintenance, and monitoring initiatives
Population boom, urbanization, and growing requirements from emerging markets have propelled the demand for minerals and metals, positioning the mining sector at the forefront of the world economy. However, like every industry, competitive trends and a rapidly evolving global business environment have driven up operating costs with very little visibility into dynamic assets controlled by the inevitable forces of nature and the economy. Here, bringing spatial data into action can throw light on a variety of information assets, such as satellite imagery, 2D and 3D visualization of mines, surface geology, current borehole locations, digital mosaics, and above all, monitoring and controlling administrative, environment, and public safety issues that are crucial for all stages of mining, from planning and exploration to closure.
As government agencies tighten their regulations on the extraction of resources, spatial data can help mine owners in areas like environmental remediation, where the project area can be returned to its original condition years into the future. In the production juncture chiefly, spatial data with a customized enterprise application can help with modeling, overseeing, and reporting of operations, along with automation and end-to-end machine control; for instance, fleet management, tailing management, survey, inspection, and more. Additionally, spatial data also helps ensure the safety of personnel as well as facilities, buying companies the right amount of time to establish safety measures against slack structural conditions and natural disasters. Simply put, implementing point cloud spatial data coupled with enterprise software applications accelerates the gathering of actionable intelligence for prompt decision-making along the entirety of the mining cycle.
Geospatial enterprise application: Unified visibility for greater insights
By leveraging Geospatial Enterprise Applications (GEA) services, utilities and mining organizations can enable asset and network management, geospatial data analytics, real-time data monitoring, and integrations between geospatial data and other existing sub-systems that help derive value-based insights from spatial data. In addition to helping address heightened regulations, environmental policies, and risk coverage formulated by the government and policymakers, GEA can help avoid audit failures and subsequent penalty scenarios altogether. It also enables cost optimization through automation, reduces manual errors through auto-checks, minimizes recurrent on-ground surveys through virtual 3D environment on map, and provisions for geospatial dashboards and alert systems for monitoring. As a one-stop solution for design and implementation of geospatial platform over cloud, network data migration, data editing, web and mobile applications, integration, data quality checks, change management and skill development through trainings, support and maintenance, GEA deployed with the right expertise can seamlessly transform from existing legacy systems and sub-systems.
GEA helps utilities and mining enterprises connect all stakeholders, financials, planning and assets, mapping services, survey mechanisms, and more for unified visibility. It also automates, translates, and transforms large volumes of spatial data while ensuring quality assurance and compliance standards are met. Even with geographic information systems (GIS) and non-standard GIS generating data in varied formats, GEA can tackle the same without creating any dependencies on third-party software. By employing a centralized solution, enterprises can simplify the implementation of utilities network data modeling, data migrations, web applications for asset management and analysis, and mobile apps for on-field surveys. The mining sector can take advantage of seamless IoT data integration, monitoring dashboards, 3D asset management, and more.
Decoding future expectations with GEA
Over the next decade, the demand for geo-enabled devices and applications will increase manifold, making the convergence of spatial data infrastructure with emerging technologies like SCADA, AI/ML models, Historian database, cloud, IoT, and more, a prerequisite rather than an option to harness value-driven insights collectively. The combination of GIS Realtime Integration, GIS Data Migration Services and GIS Data Integration Services allows the extraction of power insights. The utilities sector will operate on a fusion of management tools and databases for digitally integrated network models that extend into web and mobile applications, while the mining sector will operate on a high-functioning ecosystem that goes beyond cost optimization measures and takes into account, resource base expansions and reduced environmental footprint.
About the Author
Sanjiv Dhupkar is Head Geospatial Enterprise Application at Cyient. He has 25 years of experience delivering technology-led innovation for customers across multiple industries. Currently, he is responsible for Geospatial Solutions and Integration for Business Domains.
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