Improving efficiency with data: software program provides company performance analysis.

• Author: Kelly, Lindsay

A new software program designed for the mining industry is using production data to help companies make strategic business decisions, improving efficiency and visibility.

Scio (pronounced "SEE-oh"), designed by Sudbury-based Centric Mining Systems. gathers performance data gleaned from mining operations, and then interprets the information to highlight any correlations it finds.

Centric founder and CEO Chris Novak said the program has been in the works for about a year. The mining industry is notorious for doing a terrible job at using data in an advantageous way, he said. The introduction of Scio aims to change that.

"The mining industry is really good at proactively using financial data. but always reactive in terms of looking at the actual activities going on around ore tracking," Novak said.

Centric has, for years, been gathering data for companies for everything from tracking the movement of ore to generating production reconciliation reports. Scio is designed to operate in tandem with Centric, but can also be used on its own.

The idea behind using data to make business decisions--known as business intelligence--isn't a new one. Companies have been using it for years, across industries, but information has typically been gathered piecemeal, turned into graphs and charts, and that's where its efficacy ended, Novak said.

"They could create a pretty picture, but they really still didn't understand the data they had," he said.

Scio takes the interpretation of that data one step further by finding relationships amongst the numbers, which can be used by the companies to make strategic business decisions.

The system can examine, for example, the relationship between workforce size and safety, or production rates and environmental occurrences. It can demonstrate how well the company is producing, how well its resource models are performing, and how well it's delivering product to the market.

It also connects seamlessly with Centric's core product, which makes Scio stand out amongst its competitors.

"Because our core system is designed to house all these metrics--resource models, mining activities, consumables, drill and blast--it gives us the ability to make Scio smart and look at that data and automatically come up with scenarios that the business is going to get value from," Novak said. "That is unique."

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