Glencore Coal Assets Australia’s Mobile Equipment Operator Awareness
The health and safety of the operators of large mining equipment is a major focus for Glencore. Breadcrumb Digital was engaged to centralise driver awareness data from Glencore’s open cut mines and establish a near real-time reporting capability for their Operator Awareness Monitoring Centre (OAMC).
The client
Glencore is a global natural resources organisation that produces and supplies a broad range of commodities to both domestic and international markets. Their operations span extraction, refining and logistics in which they responsibly source the commodities that advance everyday life.
The challenge
Breadcrumb was engaged to establish a self-service reporting capability for Glencore Coal Assets Australia’s (GCAA) newly provisioned Operator Awareness Monitoring Centre (OAMC) in Wallsend, NSW. The reporting capability would complement other centralised monitoring capabilities at the OAMC and enable near real-time reporting on driver awareness events.
Key challenges:
- near real-time integration of data replicated from eleven open-cut mine sites
- provisioning a database and supporting load processes that could consolidate data received from sites
- building an initial reporting suite tailored to the needs of OAMC personnel
- establishing a self-service capability to enable OAMC personnel to intuitively build their own reports.
The skills
The project required the following skills and competencies:
- Microsoft data engineering expertise, including the ability to process large volumes of structured data in near real-time
- experience with data modelling and delivering a self-service reporting capability on the Microsoft BI stack
- designing a set of Power BI reports that source from a semantic data model.
Michael Cowls
Tony Ketteringham
Jake Waterer
The approach
The engagement commenced with a short discovery phase to capture both the functional and non-functional requirements of the solution. Several high-level design options and associated investment details were then presented at the completion of the discovery phase. Breadcrumb also conducted a demo to showcase some of the modern Microsoft BI capabilities that would be enabled through the options.
With a three-person delivery team, several technical components were developed in parallel and development resources focused on their domain of expertise. Breadcrumb worked closely with both Hexagon Mining and GCAA to establish the near real-time data replication from remote mine sites. Draft reports were showcased early to inform the refining of the data model and the data preparation activities.
The solution
An end-to-end data centralisation and reporting solution was provisioned that consisted of:
- a central SQL Server database where data from eleven mine sites is consolidated
- an automated near real-time data integration process
- a self-service semantic data model implemented with Microsoft Analysis Services
- a foundational set of Power BI reports that automatically refresh in near real-time (the reports present both live operational data as well as historical trends).
The outcome
The solution went live shortly after the establishment of the OAMC, and the reports enabled a key capability in the overall function of the OAMC. Providing visibility of driver fatigue data in the context of broader historical trends has allowed OAMC personnel to identify anomalies in real-time and take appropriate action. The self-service component of the solution provides a foundation upon which custom reports can be rapidly built by senior OAMC staff. The reporting solution has also assisted GCAA management in identifying longer-term initiatives for driving operator awareness improvements across their open-cut mines.