Phinar Software: Strengthening Mining Industry with Advanced Analytics Support

Mining and exploration are becoming more complex, driving the need for new, cost-effective, flexible, and 3D integrated data analysis and analytics solutions, to empower geoscientists to continually enhance their decision-making skills. By incorporating the modern pool of technologies, mining industries can reduce the complexities while extracting valuable minerals or other geological materials from any type of deposit of earth. Witnessing the significance of advanced software solutions in the mining industry for addressing the mission-critical infrastructure, Australia-based Phinar Software brings data analytics and visualization software with capabilities that legacy systems lack. “We create specialized, enjoyable, and affordable data analytics software for specific market segments with our current area of focus being the mining and geology market,” asserts Rob de Bruin, Director of Phinar Software. The firm’s acumen to integrate its products with corporate workflows, and add value to specific market segments including mining and exploration, oil and gas, and environment, differentiates it from other key players in the same space.

Assisted by a competent team with a combined experience of 60 years in mining and exploration software, the company introduces 3D data analytics and analysis software — X10-Geo, which assists its users in mitigating the complexities associated with large and disparate sets of data in the mining and metals market. The software enables geoscientists to promptly attain an in-depth understanding of the raw and derived data, and continually enhance their decision-making skills. It further empowers the users with a combination of raw data and geostatistical analysis in tables and summary graphs which is directly linked on screen to interactive 3D visualization of the data. The users also get a platform to easily group, compare, and slice and dice data.

With X10-Geo, users can also promptly identify and report data patterns and relationships and associated 3D trends, analyzing spatial multi-element and multi-domain data, as well as reporting multiple auto-formatted graphs into documents at the click of a button. The users can also test assumptions to validate process results, from mineralization domains to estimation, simulation, and optimization models. With this rich suite of benefits, the software allows the users to mitigate the restrictions that usually prevail in the legacy systems including copying and pasting graphs into reports and assisting them in handling the critical steps of the data flow from exploration to milling. X10 also provides the integrated geostatistical and validation tools to perform quality exploratory data analysis to facilitate and improve resource estimates that comply with the JORC Code guidelines.

One of the testimonials that elucidate the benefits of X10-Geo is of Kinross, a gold, and silver mining company who was also one of the first users of the software. Dave Eden from Kinross delineates that using X10-Geo their geologists could load the assays (lab results on gold grade) with a complex set of geologic variables, and quickly scan the variety of plots that X10-Geo auto-generated. This allowed the geologist to easily identify which geologic variables control the occurrence of gold. With X10-Geo software, the gold mining company was further able to auto-generate statistical tables that can summarize the average gold grade from any outliers in the distributions. These results enabled the geologist to focus more on analysing the most relevant data while refining the 3D digital model. The overall result was that X10-Geo allowed the geologist to develop a higher quality resource estimation model in less time.

De Bruin emphasizes that SaaS and Distributed and Cloud Computing will drive the modern technologies in days ahead. “The things we do in X10-Geo cannot yet be done with Internet and browser technology, but give it three to five years and desktop technology may go the way of the dinosaurs,” he adds.

De Bruin explains that the company is currently focused on developing X10-Geo V2 which will be another significant step up in the way spatial and other technical data can be organized, grouped, compared, and reported. He further highlights that this development program will be completed in the first half of 2018. The firm is also working on its distributed X10-Workflow technology, which is slated to release in the next 12 months. “The blend of these two will assist mining corporations to integrate X10-Geo’s robust data analytics within their existing workflows, and provide innovators working on cutting-edge algorithms with a best-in-class prototyping and commercialization platform,” concludes De Bruin.