Pulse Mining Systems: The Harbinger of BI solutions for Mining Operations

Mark Spry , CEO

Mining has for millennia has been a core human enterprise and a key source of wealth. Many societies since ancient times have thrived due to the wealth generated from the mining activities in their regions. Today however the game has changed considerably with some minerals and resources having become very scarce due to constant mining activity, requiring miners to seek the aid of advanced technology to further delve into the deep corners of the earth to uncover the resources concealed within. Modern mining involves the incorporation of several technologies cohering to make the entire process easier and more productive. Australian company Pulse Mining Systems has been a key player in this new age of mining and for over thirty years has been at the forefront of providing mining technology services to the Australian mining industry.

Conceived in 1984 in the Hunter valley of New South Wales, Pulse Mining originally took shape as a consultancy that also provided data processing services to the mining industry. Its location, which is also home to Newcastle port, the world’s largest coal port, provided the company with easy access to highly lucrative projects which enabled it to grow rapidly in its early years. Initial success encouraged Pulse Mining management two years later to develop their own ERP solution and incorporate it into their offering, thereby expanding their area of expertise and stance in the market. “The Pulse Mining ERP currently covers 2,500 functions across 58 sub-modules which are grouped into 5 high-level module areas,” says Mark Spry, CEO Pulse Mining Systems. The ERP suite offered by Pulse mining covers all processes involved in mining from Production and Plant Maintenance, to Supply and Utilities, right through to Marketing and Logistics.

For the mining industry where the processes undertaken are subject largely to a cycle of investment and expenditure on a large scale, Pulse Mining’s ERP suite offers effective governance of data, resources and personnel. Pulse Mining offers a new edge to the traditional data capture and management toolsets such as spreadsheets which usually don’t derive the most effective results owing to their inability to communicate with each other. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) here creates the most suitable environment for data to revolve around and communicate with other tools, thereby delivering a boost in efficiency for the whole process. In recent years Pulse Mining has had a keen focus towards developing tools that are ‘fit for purpose and are ‘best of breed’.

Towards this end Pulse Mining has taken several steps including inviting an independent BI consultant and a select group of analysts to present their respective products to the company. From these products Pulse Mining integrated two solutions, Birst and Tableau that the company found most suitable for their particular goal of providing data analytics with a tactical and operational focus. Birst is a cloud hosted end-to-end solution which offers unique capabilities for the development of analytics targeted to operational users rather than those in the C-suite. Tableau is a visualization tool that is flexible and relatively easy to master and is a valuable asset while extracting actionable insights from unstructured data. Pulse Mining has found great success with this tool as it enables its clients to minimize the time required to visualize and extract information from data by huge margins.

Pulse Mining can be considered as one of the very first companies to integrate the potencies of both Tableau and Birst to deliver highly effective results

Pulse Mining can be considered as one of the very first companies to integrate the potencies of both Tableau and Birst to deliver highly effective results. Over the years Pulse Mining’s efforts to deliver the best solutions to optimize specific mining processes have been paying huge dividends for both its clients and itself. In the years to come Pulse Mining intends to expand its service competency around building tools that can enhance mining operational functionality.