Want insider knowledge about Wenco's R&D?

February 17, 2017

RICHMOND, BC, CANADA (February 17, 2017) — Itching to know more about the real advantages of mining technology? Swing by the Colorado Convention Center next week for our series of presentations at the SME Annual Conference & Expo, happening in Denver, Colorado.

On Tuesday, February 21, our experts will deliver a set of papers on the latest R&D going into Wenco's suite of mine performance technology. These sessions offer a rare peek behind the curtain as we gear up to launch our forthcoming Wenco System 6.0. Check out the details below for times and locations.

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All sessions will take place at the Colorado Convention Center — 700 14th Street, Denver, Colorado.

Knowledge Transfer at Mines: How E-Learning Technology Can Ease the Burden

Devon Wells | 9:25 AM | Room 612
Knowledge management is a growing concern for mining and other heavy industries. Many operations in these fields subsist through ad hoc decisions and institutional knowledge held by experienced personnel. However, these fields also see significant turnover as personnel retire, advance into senior roles, or migrate to other sites and operations. An aging workforce only compounds this issue. This regular turnover contributes to the vulnerability of institutional knowledge and may reduce the efficacy of these operations as a whole. As a result, facilitating the transfer of knowledge presents a major challenge for mining operations and their human resource departments. This paper demonstrates the potential for technological solutions — in particular, e-learning software — to mitigate the impact of personnel changes in mining. It shows how e-learning creates knowledge redundancy, eases knowledge transfer, and contributes to a continuity of institutional information as junior personnel move into key roles at mines.

Business Intelligence and Mining: Implementation Issues and Propositions to Address Them

Leonardo Avila | 10:05 AM | Room 505
The capacity for extensive data collection has transformed many industries in recent years, including mining. Yet, this wealth of data presents a new challenge: how to make sense of it. While industries such as retail have successfully incorporated off-the-shelf business intelligence platforms, mining has struggled. Historically, these solutions have proved ineffective at handling the types of data required for mining analytics, such as the large degree of geospatial records. Likewise, visualization components of these solutions lacked turnkey dashboards practical for mining, particularly in terms of mapping and location reporting. Custom configuration of these systems greatly increased their demand on resources and added a further barrier to their implementation. This paper discusses the issues interfering with the adoption of business intelligence by the mining industry. Then, it proposes parameters for a mining-specific solution designed to reduce configuration time, demands on technical support, and logistical hurdles involved with integrating business intelligence into mining.

Mining Safer Together: Stronger Collision Avoidance Through Integrating Contextual FMS Data

Jason Clarke | 2:45 PM | Room 610
Safety remains a major concern of the mining industry. Research from groups such as the Earth Moving Equipment Safety Round Table (EMESRT) has helped to establish best practices for operating heavy equipment in a safe manner. EMESRT recommendations contribute to equipment and software designs that reduce fatalities, injuries, and occupational illnesses associated with mining equipment. Many collision avoidance systems incorporate logic based on these recommendations to sort real safety hazards from benign proximity events. Although this technology functions with greater efficacy than previous systems, it does little to address a persistent issue inherent to any rule-based proximity detection logic: false positives due to missing contextual awareness. Integrating collision avoidance systems with fleet management data adds this necessary context. Equipment status, elevation, and other parameters collected by a real-time fleet management system can affect the severity of hazards found through a collision avoidance system. This paper discusses the impacts to mining safety that arise as a result of incorporating contextual fleet management data into collision avoidance logic scenarios.

Mark your calendars now to make sure you don't miss any of these sessions. Our speakers will also be available throughout the week to answer any questions and to give more insight on using technology for stronger mining.

For more information in the meantime, please contact Marketing Supervisor Geoff Gauthier at ggauthier@wencomine.com or 604.270.8277.

About Wenco International Mining Systems

For over 30 years, Wenco International Mining Systems has worked with mining companies to extract unrealized value. Under this mission, Wenco has developed an integrated suite of solutions to support the digital transformation of the mining industry. Fleet management, asset health, data analytics, and other technologies join together in the spirit of open interoperability and scalability to raise mine productivity and efficiency, lower routine costs, and establish a safe and smooth mining operation.

Wenco is a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi Construction Machinery headquartered in Vancouver, Canada.

www.wencomine.com

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