Welcome to the beyond digital transformation podcast! A platform for results driven mining industry leaders, to share their stories of transformation in deploying people- focused technology practices that deliver meaningful, measurable impacts for their mining operations. This podcast features experiences and opinions from established mining industry leaders and influencers who have participated in the beyond digital transformation mining technology conference series since 2018. learn from these and other industry leaders, on how to mitigate the obstacles of deploying mining systems that help you get on the path to a digitally enabled mining operation with a people- first philosophy.

Hello, welcome to our webinar on Strategies to Guarantee Network Uptime in Remote Operations. My name is Martin Provencher, I'm the global industry principal for mining metals and materials at AVEVA, and I will be your chair for today's session. So this session is brought to you by BDT Beyond Digital Transformation. BDT is actually a platform for results driven mining professionals who want to deploy systems that deliver measurable impacts for their mining operations. Each stream brings together three unique perspectives. Mining operations, mining industry partners, and a mining industry supplier. So this stream is about connectivity and communication. And we have three chairs, on this stream actually. Charles Nyabeze from MICA is chairing a session with Greg Sandblom from Sudbury INO a Glencore, and with me Martin Provencher from AVEVA, which is sponsoring the event. So I guess we can start the video now.

The new digital era for industrial organizations is here, and for the mining industry it is no different. Today's volatile commodity prices, evolving, environmental regulations and declining investment ability mean minors must shift their focus towards operational efficiency. To stay ahead of the curve. Safety, social license to operate, and sustainable practices remain at the forefront of all operations. Employee safety and wellbeing must come first, as well as that of local communities and stakeholders and the wellbeing of the very earth in which we dig. So how can a mind be sustainable, keep its workers safe, and maintain the respect and care for all stakeholders? The answer lies in digital transformation.. Applying digital tools and principles that enable mining companies to make the most of their efforts to process information and make the best business decisions possible for everyone. Many organizations are attempting to analyze, manage, and unify their data processes and supply chains. The challenge many mining, metals, and minerals companies now face, is understanding how to bring these principles together in a systematic, comprehensive, and intelligent way that will truly transform their operations. As with other industries, it's essential to operate with the highest levels of efficiency, corporate social responsibility, and regulatory compliance. When applied successfully, a digital transformation strategy can accelerate your mining operations. Enhance your productivity, reduce your costs, and help you surpass your competition. Increase workforce efficiency by 20% and improve data accuracy by 10 to 20%. But what does it take to implement a successful digital strategy? And where do you focus your efforts to get the greatest returns? First, start with enhancing edge to enterprise visibility and control. Then look at how you can optimize your value chain and to understanding the health of your assets. Leading companies have achieved 10% increased production by improving overall equipment effectiveness. 15% reduced cost in maintenance, and 80% reduced safety incidents. AVEVA is helping leading companies to drive efficiencies throughout the mining life cycle. Let us lead you on your digital mining transformation to shape your digital sustainable future.

Thank you. So welcome to our third panel, discussion for the Beyond Digital Transformation Connectivity and Communication Stream Session one, Explore general challenges and opportunities in connectivity in a remote first mining environment from the perspective of working remotely. Session two, explore the details of accessing operations data when working remotely. And today, session three, we will be exploring the different strategies mining companies are adopting to guarantee network uptime in a remote operation. So today with me, we have, Chris Bertrand from Vale Sudbury. Chris, you might wanna introduce yourself.

Hi, I'm Chris Bertrand. I'm with Vale in the technology department and I'm an enterprise architect, so my role is to ensure that our solutions that are made up of software, hardware, networking components, meet the business requirements in a sustainable approach.

Thank you Chris. And we have Eric L'Heureux from Ambra Solutions. So Eric, why don't introduce yourself.

Of course. My name is Eric L'Heureux, Telecom engineers, CEO of Ambra Solutions, and for the past 15 years, Ambra Solutions has been designing and deploying wireless technologies for the mining industry. So we've been, we're currently deploying roughly 20 new private 4G 5G a year, and we've been covering over 700 kilometers of underground mining tunnels so far. So we're pretty active in the industry for that zero right now.

Very good. Thank you very much. And, me, I'm the, I will be chairing the session Martin Provencher again from AVEVA as the, global industry principle for mining, metals and materials. So a summary of the activities that we've had so far. March 22nd, we had a kickoff, in person event. and of course it was streamed on LinkedIn, live from Sudbury. on April 18th, we had our, second, panel or, second event where we talked about accessing operations data in remote first mine environment. And today, October 4th, we are talking about strategies to guarantee network up time in remote operations. next will be November 22nd. we'll be talking about using operations data to improve decision making for the production and maintenance. of course, KPIs designed for specific, mining activities. And in December 2nd or December 9th, the date is still to be determined. There will be another in person event that will be streamed live from Toronto. what's unique about our BDT community is that it brings the mining company perspective to the table. It also helps driving industry collaboration, so minors, helping minors, and of course, BDT is, donating, all the profits. So has donated over a hundred thousand dollars to charity up to date. And this year is the Sudbury Action Center for Youth. that is the charity, that has been selected for 2022 and of course, thanks to our sponsors, Red Path Mining Tractors and Engineers providing full service mining solutions and innovation around the world since 1962 PACE.global digital adoption specialist helping you achieve measurable results with your technology. AVEVA a global leader in industrial software Glencore, one of the world's largest globally diversified natural resource companies, and MICA Mining innovation commercialization accelerator. so now let's start with the today's topic. if you have any question, please bring it to the, re stream. please ask them using the re stream button. We'll be happy to cover those questions. of course, if we have the authorization and if it's related to the topic first question to everyone, and we'll start maybe with Chris. So Chris, what are the key concepts when we talk about remote operations?

So I, I think the first thing to understand is that Vale's on a voyage and, I can talk really well about what we're doing now, where that leads us into the future starts to get a little more grey cuz there's different business drivers that are going to come into play and, constraints of course from industry. But, today I can say that we're concentrating on underground. for remote operations, eventually, we'll move outside of the underground piece and cover surface plants and logistics, that type of thing. I'd say in the underground we're built around concepts of monitoring activities against schedule and providing, direction, for course correction. And this is closely aligned with the concepts of short interval control within, the mining industry. teleremote, equipment operations are not currently in scope for a remote operation center. we have, what we call it, iROC, integrated remote operation center, concept in Vale in the subway location and we are starting to monitor, the mines within this area with that, that iROC process. as I said, the interplant and logistics surface plants, will be added in at a point in the future. These processes are probably less complex because there's a lot more, repetition to the process, whereas mining activities around the schedule are a lot harder to control and maintain. So we won't necessarily use the findings that we have. It's not gonna be a cut and paste from underground to surface plants. We'll have to do some analysis of those areas and look for bottleneck and decision points as we move outside of the mining.

Great. Thanks a lot Chris. And I think we have, we have a video, that you were, allowed to share from Vale so maybe we can share that, with the audience now.

At Vale we continue to invest in new innovations and new technologies that will transform our business, improving our safety and productivity, and strengthening our reputation in mining leadership, one of our boldest investments and commitments to innovation, is the new integrated remote operations center or iROC located at our North Atlantic Operational headquarters in Sudbury, Ontario. What exactly is iROC? IROC is a cornerstone in data and communications. This centralized center will streamline and strengthen our communications with the leaders and frontline workers across all our mines iROC is like an air traffic control tower for our mining operations. Linked through underground digital connectivity. A network of multi-screen computer stations will show IRO specialists a complete picture of every aspect of our operations. From the rock face to meeting customer delivery, this 24 7 continuous. Real time iROC data will allow us to quickly update and adjust our operational plans so that our workforce at site can continue to drive our mining operations safely. It will also improve our ability to analyze recurring problems quickly, developing effective solutions with reliable data to reflect our commitment to continuous improvement. Most importantly, iROC will bring greater safety visibility like never before. In the events of an emergency, real time information about frontline personnel and equipment will reduce response times and help us develop a clear plan of action to return our workers to surface and ensure they all go home safe. In our first phase, iROC will connect our Creighton Coleman and Tutton Mines in Sudbury, with plans to include our other mines and processing plants across Canada. With the launch of iROC Vale continues to usher in a new era of technology and innovation. Exploring and adapting to new approaches and new technologies that will help us prosper, a stronger, safer future is only a connection away.

That's very good. Thanks a lot, Chris, for sharing that. And thanks to Vale for allowing us to, to share this video. It gives us a very good, overview of, what we're talking about, when we're talking about remote operations. Now, Eric from a communications specialist perspective, what would be the key concepts for you when we're talking about remote operations?

remote operation, of course, for us it's tied to the back haul, whether it's fiber optic, microwave, satellite so for us, of course, the first thing we always check is there any redundant back haul available? depending on the location of the mine. So this is of course the first thing because when it comes to monitoring like Vale is doing, or when it comes to remote control, this is definitely the first thing that we check is redundancy and reliability. And we see more and more mines going to remote operation in order to increase the safety of the workers and of course to increase the efficiency. So really it's all about, okay, what is available, Where is the mine located and what are the different options? And this. Basically we help and recommend and we work with the customers, to present some solutions. So this is, for us, the key concept of a remote operation is analyzing what's in place, what's in what is in there, and what we can do Basically.

Very good. Thank you very much. Now, returning to Chris, what kind of services or mining activities can be done remotely? you shared a video, but are there any specific things that, that you would like to highlight from a mining perspective?

it really, there's lots of possibilities. as I mentioned earlier, valet is starting with a level of this monitoring and, providing course correction. But, we have as well looked at some smaller implementations of, teleremote and autonomous for our, LHDs or scoops as we call'em here. and some drills, but these, these remote equipment operations are not part of the iROC scope right now. they were run on, separate projects, and Maybe you have a, an opportunity to go into this a little deeper later, but for now, the concept of these teleremotes tend to be, driven, at the plant. So it's not really removing that work from the plant is not a focus force right now. from a technology point of view, I guess the possibilities are endless, right? the technology's getting better, whether it's, 3D cameras or, the ability to give better feedback to somebody who's not physically there and in a way to, to do jobs remotely, I think is getting better and better. I think what we have to figure out from a Vale point of view is what is right for each of the processes, and we want to ensure that we have the right failovers from a production of course, but also safety. And that we assess this on a case by case nature. So it was right for one process in mining might not be the right answer for another process in mining, I guess is what I'm saying.

Yeah. Great. Thanks. and now Eric, what about the network access to, in remote sites that have basically no network connectivity, If we think about, Mine sites that are, up north or quite remote, What is it that you can share with us about these things?

No, definitely. a lot of them are connected using satellite. As before it was using what we call geo satellite, long latency. So a lot of application were not possible using those satellite, because of the latency. And now we see more and more new LEO satellite, which reduced that latency. so that opens up. The way to some new use cases that were not possible before. However, we need to keep in mind that as mentioned by Chris remote operations still, will be done remotely or will be done on premise. I'm sorry, because it requires a lot of bandwidth. And also, some application like push to talk requires really low latency. So there's always gonna be some, some application of use cases that will have to be done on premise. But we see more and more options now with those new LEO satellite, with those new back haul options, the fiber optic, the microwave, which is now getting possible to extend networks. To those remote areas. so this is now we see more and more options on the market, which were not available a few years ago. So that's why it changes a lot, the options and offers new options for the mining companies now. Very good. and you talked about bandwidth. what would be the bandwidth that would typically be required for proper remote operations? So two things. If we do monitoring, like Vale is doing, the bandwidth is, is fairly low, meaning a few megabits per second is required. When it comes to remote operation, this is where it requires a lot of bandwidth because this is all about video, which is streaming from the machine upload in the upload auction. So for every machine that we were multi controlling, you need between five to 10 megabit per second per machine. So that's a lot of bandwidth. So this is why. We have to do remote operation on premise. if we don't have a good enough back haul, if we have a good back haul. We see mining companies now remotely controlling machines, but they need like a robust fiber or microwave in order to do this because of the high bandwidth requirement from those machines that are remotely operated.

Very good. Thanks, and thanks every and Chris, from a mining operator perspective, any risks related to having people not at site when we're talking about remote operations?

yeah, it goes back to my balance argument, right? So there's, we have to find that rate, balance and, Vale of course has an ongoing goal to remove people out of harm's way. the safer we can make people, the better, our company is, right? from a looking after our personnel, but also from, I guess from a public relations point of view, we want to do the right thing. And so that's what we're trying to do is make sure that we're not. Putting people in harms way way that we can take out of that situation. but that doesn't mean, as Eric was saying, that they, the remote operation has to be hundreds of kilometers away. we need to assess the risk. And those failovers that I talked about earlier in those backup processes, those failovers may necessitate that remote control is still above ground at site I'd say even in those situations where Eric was saying, You have very good. networking to be able to provide, the opportunity to do it a hundred kilometers away. you still have that possibility that link goes down and when it goes down, that is a risk to production. So you have to weigh the pros and cons of doing the work remotely and making sure that, you have the ability. If the network link goes down to still operate somehow, and I think that's that balance that we have to think of.

and you talked about the underground, question to Eric. How can we ensure proper communication underground? as Chris was talking about, this is their main focus for now, but how is it that we can ensure proper communication?

underground communication right now is going under a massive transformation. So up to now most communication underground were limited to voice, using the leaky feeder system. and that technology has been there for the past 20 years now, while 4G 5G is coming to disrupt everything. Of course you can deploy the wifi, but wifi provide limited coverage, meaning that you need a lot of wifi access points to cover a whole underground mine. Whereas 4G, 5G now can cover all of the underground. Up to the face. So we can provide high speed to the face, we can provide high speed to the ramp everywhere. So now that opens up options and it reduces of course, the cost of deploying high speed communication underground. so this is why today, we have so many project, to remotely control machines, by deploying 4G 5G infrastructure. keep in mind that one LT radios cancover six hundred of tunnels right now. so that's why today mining companies are going to that path of 4g, 5G in order to increase, speed to cover the whole mine basically with high speed. So this is really change as we are right now. it's a pretty good timing for mining companies as wants to, be more efficient and use the industry four the zero era right now.

Great. Thanks. and, you're talking about the 4G and 5G networks, but we all know that the, one of the major supplier has had the, an issue, with their network. does it mean that we would need the redundancy or something like that?

We always need redundancy and also we always gonna recommend on-premise, equipment. Like Chris was mentioning, it's all about balance. I don't think you wanna put all your eggs in the cloud, as it comes to mission critical application. Everything which is non-mission critical. There's no problem to put this in the cloud, to mission critical, dark remote control of machine, this is where you want to install a system on premise. And, redundant system is really important as well for upgrade because a mine works 24 7. so when you wanna do a network upgrade, or if the network operator goes down, you still wanna be able to operate. You cannot afford shutting down a mine for, an outage or for an upgrade. So this is why we always recommend to have of course, that redundant system on premise.

Very good. and would you recommend that, having some spare equipment on site, to guarantee network availability, I mean in terms of, fiber optics, satellite hardware, uh, switches, or any kind of, equipments that you would recommend to have as a spare?

We do recommend, of course, spare equipment, whatever it's called, spare or hot spare onsite. And especially now you've seen, vendors as been having really long lead times, so you cannot afford waiting for a device or a component, right now. So we do, of course, recommend spare, spare back haul spare switches, routers of course on site. So if something happens, again, everything is fully redundant, so the mind will not be affected, but you want to quickly fix, on spare equipment. So yes, we do always recommend this.

Okay. Very good, thanks. now turning it back to you, Chris, what would you do when the internet connection gets lost? I even if we have that redundancy and things like that, and. What has happened? what do we do when things go wrong?

I guess in our case it's so not so much the internet. We're worried about, I guess as we move more to putting things in the cloud, that will be, a concern. But from a, this back haul, concept that Eric was mentioning earlier, we have our own private network, that goes from our general office area in copper cliff to each of the mines. And we have redundant links, from the, from that communications, Central point to each of the mines. And then as Eric was talking about the LTE that happens underground. So you can imagine that what we're worried about is not so much, internet, going down, but our network going down. So one of the ways we protect ourselves is with. That redundancy between, the communication path. I guess the other thing to think about is, with regards to outages that can affect us of that network, a major outage, we'll say, we don't, we haven't had any in a, in quite a while, and with that redundancy is our way to mitigate it, but we do suffer from I'll say technology difficulties now and then as any company will, as you're putting in new things or things start to age out, they're gonna start to fail a little bit. So it's in those situations, where we have to, when we have these, I'll say glitches, we have to make sure that we have processes. So the IROC has established contingency plans, in the event of either a failure of the communications I was talking about, or even say one of our key applications that support the monitoring goes down. they have, they make sure that they have these contingency plans, which will ensure minimal disruption to production, until the problem is resolved, whether it's networking or application. we're trying to make sure that. for critical applications. I like the way that, Eric named it cuz we, we have that same classification where we say something's mission critical or business critical. And then we have like business operational as a third tier. And so for those ones that are critical, whether they're mission critical, business critical, we try to make sure that we have a redundancy in our software design, but also a backup process of that the business itself are gonna be using when those applications or networks are not available.

Very good. and maybe, with regards to that, we have a question actually from the audience. Eric, you might want to answer that, question. what is your path to solve the challenge of the cloud reliance solutions versus remote locations?

I think it comes back again to, we need to separate what is mission critical? What is non-mission critical? So when it comes to mission critical, a lot of mines don't want to rely on the cloud. when you remotely control machines, when you do push to talk, when you have a, PFC communication using mud bus, that has to stay local. however, for anything which is non mission critical like iot, predictive maintenance, big data, those are all stuff that can be on the cloud. Again today with internet, redundant internet back haul you can have a fairly robust, solid back haul and you can use a cloud for those non-mission critical. So it really depends on what is the application. And definitely if you need a cloud based application, it is possible using a redundant internet back call. but again, this is for non-mission critical use cases.

Very good. Thank you Eric. and maybe, one thing that we did not cover yet, is about security. how can we ensure security with all that data being transferred? Maybe Eric, can you give us some advice on that?

we see more and more attacks, countries are trying not to attack OT networks. so this is something which every time we're designing network, we need to make sure that, it is fully robust. and especially that now that we are, we're remotely controlling machines you cannot afford that somebody takes, that machine remotely and do something. So a lot of our networks actually are not even connected to the internet, to prevent this basically. or part of the network is fully isolated from the internet. and a lot of the mines or of companies, the first thing you're gonna do if you have an attack is disconnect the internet. But you can't afford stopping a mine if you get an attack. So that's why you need to be able to continue working and to have some kind of an on-premise network that will still be able to, manage the operation of the mine even though there's no more internet. So security is really important. Of course. We need to put a lot of firewalls in the solution. and again, encryption even over the year is important. even we have some OEMs, that say that, okay, they don't trust anymore. The wifi WPA too, they want to, sim card authentication. They want encryption end to end. So even local security is now even, really important, for some OEMs. again, today we see more and more mines Fully autonomous machines. So those needs to be fully, secure. So security indeed is really important.

Very good. Thank you very much. I would like the, to ask the audience, if anyone has, some specific questions, please don't hesitate to ask your questions. We'll be happy to answer those, as, as long as we can, we can of course. so let me see here. Do we have any questions from the audience? I think we do not have any other questions.

Maybe while we're waiting. Martin, I can, give you a perspective from, the mining operator around that same question that, Eric just answered. and I think it, we are moving more and more to cloud and there's definitely a direction that way. We have to, as we move things into the cloud, we're trying to find the right balance. It's a, by word of the day would be balance right? Between, what components fit properly in the cloud and which ones don't. And when Eric mentioned, the having to have the right network security, so we have a segmented, network where we. Ot, and then we have a firewall, then we have a dmz, and then we have a firewall, and then we have our business network and another firewall until we get to the internet. So the concept of deciding which applications get hosted where, right now, anything that's business, operational running on, I'll say our global IT network are usually things that we can move to the cloud. they're easy discussions. When things are hosted in that IBM Z area, that's somewhere between OT and our business network, they're harder to actually pick up and consider to move to the cloud. And when we get down to the ot, now we're talking about things that are really hard discussions. Does it even make sense with today's technology to, to move these outside of this localized OT network? from that concept, we have things that are easy to move at the business network. Things that in the, in that, I wanna say IDM Z, but a lot of TMS people think IDM Z is something between, the business land and the internet. But in our case, this is a, an IDM Z between control and our business land. And that area is a little bit harder, or sorry, a little bit harder than the business network. The OT network, which is the closest to that mission critical definition that Eric said is the ones that, I don't think given our current technology and comfort with, production, I don't think we're ready to move those outside of, I'll say site hosted, networks for now. There is, an interesting thing since I'm on a little bit of a point here is that there's a concept of having a fail over to a another geographic location, which is really exciting. So that if you have something that happened locally, you could have the, an image of all those, virtual boxes at a geographic location other than the site that is, probably. our first step, right? but I think most people are comfortable with because it's, you're in a situation, you still have things, locally, and you fail over to another geographic site. Makes sense. In that situation, it's different than saying, let's host all our OT components, offsite. it's hybrid.

Very good. Thank you. Chris. we have a couple of questions coming in. So I'll start with this question here about the redundant infrastructure. So how do you set the balance between redundant infrastructure and the ability to repair quickly? Eric, maybe you can take that question.

That's a pretty good question. and there's really two philosophy, we see, especially underground. So in an underground mine it's not always possible to have like redundant fiber. depending on how the mine has been designed, how the fiber has been laid out. So we see customers that they don't have redundant infrastructure underground, but they have, really they've been designing, ways to quickly fix, if something happens, the fiber get cut, they can quickly fix it. so they minimize the downtime. Sometimes it's not even possible to have redundant back haul, underground. and sometime of course it takes more component and some mines they do the balance. Okay. it worth it to spend twice as much money underground for redundancy compared to quickly fixing the, the issue when it happens. So it's really there two fields of thought out there, and I think it's case per case, some mines will have the ability to do it. Physically, some mines don't have the ability to do it, so they will actually prefer to quickly fix and have spare parts, underground. so it's really the, there's no answer. There's no ideal answer because both are really, used right now in the industry and we can definitely support both.

Very good. Thank you. we have another question from the audience here. this question is for Chris. What is the current status of the iROC? Are all three sites now being run from the iROC?

being run is probably not a good way to, to describe what we're doing, So the execution and the supervising is still all done locally. it's that monitoring concept. So I can say that we have different, in an agile way, we're rolling out to the different mines. And to say that mine A and mine B are both, doing everything the same way at a hundred percent, I don't think we can say that. I would say that we've got two mines that are, at a fairly good maturity. And we have one more that we're moving towards, implementation and maturity. and I don't see, until we get to a point where, we've been running this for a couple years, we're not gonna have that ability to say, Oh, all the mines in Canada are, running the processes a hundred percent the same. And they're all at the same maturity. and I wouldn't use the term run so that we have to think of what is the objective. The objective is to, to monitor and, look for, I say problems or gaps with, meeting the schedule, scheduled production, is what we're doing current.

Yeah. Very good. Thanks. Thanks a lot. And thanks for clarifying the aspect of, being run or running a mine. this is a very important topic. we have another question here. Let me see here. Has there been any discussion around a shared infrastructure program supported through the mining companies and mining suppliers to ensure network up time for remote operations. so I don't know if, if Eric, maybe you can take that one. Are you aware of something like that?

there's more and more program like, Simi and MICA that have, like funding to, to develop a new solution for and of course when a solution is good for one mine, it's good for all the other mines. So of course we will always try to see what is currently out there, without reinventing the wheels, right? so definitely I will look for, for anyone to, to see what is currently doing using those program right now. I don't know if the answers is a question, was around funding programs or more about knowledge sharing? One thing that we've been knowing for your information is in the past years before Covid, we used to bring all mining companies that have similar technologies together so they can share, Okay, I've done this, how it was done. And that was really valuable because as we mentioned, usually all mining companies are similar, they have similar needs. so I think that's one of the thing we recommend is to do those kind of knowledge sharing session. We bring all of those mining companies in the room and we share those experiences. That's what I will.

Yep. Very good. Thanks. thank you. A I think that's it for today. thank you very much. Thank you to, to, to both of you, Chris and Eric. for this panel. I think I would like to thank also, the BDT organization beyond Digital Transformation for setting it up. BDT is also looking for sponsorships for other streams. Of course. If you have any interest in sponsoring those events, please contact Neha, Singh team@pace.global. so we have a couple of streams, community and collaboration, development and design, power and possibilities, people in partnerships. so those are all streams that, you can support. of course, please remember to join us on November 22nd, where we will be having another panel, talking about using operations data to improve decision making for production and maintenance. And, of course I'd like to thank our sponsors for supporting this event. And of course, Thank you, Chris. Thank you, Eric. I think this was a very good panel. I hope, everybody enjoyed it. please if you have any other questions, don't hesitate to reach out to us, further or later on. Thank you very much.

Thanks everyone.

Thank you.