DIGITALIZATION
THE DIGITAL PROPOSITION Digital transformation has gone from being a buzzword to being a reality in mining. A panel at this year’s PDAC looked at the progress so far, including Teck’s RACE21 program. By Alisha Hiyate
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ith its RACE21 program, which launched in 2019, Teck Resources set out to be a leader in the digital transformation under way in mining. And while the initiative has produced real gains in productivity across its Highland Valley Copper and metallurgical coal operations in British Columbia (see RACE21 sidebar on page 26), those results are not yet fully appreciated by the market, said Kalev Ruberg, Teck’s VP Future and chief innovation officer, at this year’s virtual Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada conference. “The transition has been so fast and effective that analysts have had very little time to react – and they’re not used to looking at this type of change within a mining company and gauging its effect,” Ruberg said in a panel on digitalization at PDAC moderated by Angelina Mehta, director of mining investment banking at Laurentian Securities. The difficulty is that while digitalization has created real value, quantifying that value is not necessarily easy to do – even though digitalization is all about collecting, measuring and acting on data. “These investments actually diffuse their value across the entire company,” Ruberg explained. “You’re changing the way that processing is done by 2% or 3%, but the diffusion of that value is across not only the processing but it begins with the haul, it begins with mining, and goes all the way back through logistics.” CONTINUED ON PAGE 22
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