Digital Technologies have already transformed the mining industry, and continuing advances generate even more complex datasets – the potential of which is unrealized when it is isolated.
For this reason, global market intelligence firms all agree that the digital shift to platform-enabled data management is the key to delivering future business value transforming the technology provider/client relationship from a task-specific technology supplier relationship to a strategic partner, supporting enterprise business goals.
An integrated, vendor-agnostic open data platform like SourceOne® provides many benefits not only to the mining organizations it serves but also to its technology partners. Only a handful of those benefits are described here.
1. Increase Value of the Data Their Technology Generates
To stay competitive, technology providers must ensure the data they create for their clients has the greatest possible value. A value that can only be fully realized when combined with other relevant data drawn from an asynchronous multiuser environment that can be collated and analyzed for informed, strategic decisions in real-time.
By bridging organizational silos, the entire enterprise can connect to and share cross-departmental data, allowing partners and their products to benefit from advanced analysis to understand key business metrics.
2. Increase Product Value and Customer Retention
A data platform creates new opportunities for providers to better understand clients’ needs and expand their footprint.
Because the platform is open access to all data, a technology provider can ensure continuous integrations of solutions with clients’ varying data sources, thereby increasing their own value and extending the life of their product.
And as the various formats, sources, and deployments of data grows exponentially, clients can optimize this wealth of new data while increasing functionality with their existing systems and tools.
3. Shorten the Sales Cycle and Reduce Barriers to Customer Adoption
Being integrated with a data platform can lead to a faster sales cycle. The internal review process for any significant application purchase can be time-consuming and thorough, especially for products with strategic importance.
Vendors should be satisfied their IT team can install and update applications easily while being able to control the timing and versions of updates. Using the same data governance framework and an updated security system gives customers the confidence to proceed with their purchases quicker.
The delivery of reliable and accurate data can include scheduling dashboards, reports, workflows, and proactive alerts for pre-determined conditions. This functionality helps eliminate bottlenecks in business process workflows and ensures delivery of updated KPIs to authorized users for timely decision-making.
4. More Efficient Use of Development Time and Resources
Integrating with an open data platform frees up time, funds, and resources spent on building and maintaining connectors to a variety of systems and focus instead on product development and enhancement. Technology providers can do what they do best while still taking advantage of the latest and greatest technology and benefits provided by an open platform. Technology providers can deliver the best possible product in the best possible format.
5. Support Clients in a Virtual Work Environment
A data platform accommodates multiple remote users concurrently with automated merges, allowing teams to work seamlessly together from anywhere, anytime to a clean state. A geographically diverse team can collaborate, transfer data and messages as part of a workflow, always be able to work with the latest data, and know the genesis of each data. Data generated through a provider tool becomes an integral element of the virtual work environment, creating a reliance relationship with the mining client.
6. Augmented Data Management
A data platform allows your customers to better manage their data governance strategy. This can include what data is collected, who can access it, modify it, and when data has ‘expired’ according to the vendor data governance framework that satisfies its present and future business needs. A comprehensive data platform can simplify vendor data governance by integrating it with frameworks for other levels such as audit, finance, sales, procurement, legal, etc.
7. Enhanced Security
A data platform delivers a single point of access via modern authentication tools to ensure authorization for your users. Through this, you can easily control and track who can access data via the platform. Analytics and other Big Data systems frequently deal with financial, technical, or other proprietary information. By delivering your product as an integrated application, you can use our built-in security system to prevent access by unauthorized users and ensure data transfers are secure.
Your application is safer, so your customers gain confidence in your products.
Forward-Looking
Platform-enabled data management is the future of mining. According to Phil Carter, chief analyst with the International Data Corporation (IDC), within the next three years, 65% of organizations will modernize their legacy systems and pursue new platform technologies (Digitalist, March 2020).
Don’t get left behind; ensure you remain competitive in this new technology landscape.