There is a story developing in processing plants. It began slowly over the last decade as the high-grade material got mined and the sector wrestled with having to dig deeper and work harder to extract ore. Operating costs skyrocketed until global economic pressures put the squeeze on everyone. The resilient miners got smarter to improve their plants' efficiencies and abilities to handle lower and more variable ore grades. They turned to instrumentation to measure and automate, step by step, control loop by control loop. But the tools that first gave marginal gains have begun to show a fuller potential. All this instrumentation - and the data it collects - does not just allow miners to improve their plant's efficiencies within the same old way of doing things. It is a gateway to a whole new approach with faster, smarter, more productive and efficient processing that eliminates the manual guesswork and enables operators and metallurgists to run their operations with precision and accuracy. It is a digitalized future of opportunities in real time. And from needing much convincing to adopt new technologies, miners who have had the Eureka moment are suddenly developing the technologies themselves or seeking them out to improve their plant performance.
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