MineSense taps Oracle Autonomous Database for greater efficiency, sustainability
The mining tech company uses Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse, APEX, and Generative AI to improve productivity, profitability, and customer service.
“With a powerful platform in Oracle Autonomous Database, combined with our advanced sensors and machine learning algorithms, we can produce data that helps miners to better distinguish high-grade ore from low-grade waste in real time. This leads to process optimizations that dramatically improve mine profitability and sustainability.”
Business challenges
MineSense Technologies provides equipment and digital solutions to help the world’s largest mines to maximize output. Its X-ray devices have robust sensors to capture mineral data at the start of the mining process to optimize metal recovery. The data produced, combined with advanced machine learning algorithms, is at the core of the value MineSense generates. It needed a powerful data platform to grade the ore in every shovel bucket. It sought to optimize the downstream use of power and water to extract the ore while minimizing the waste generated.
Why MineSense chose Oracle
MineSense chose Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) with Oracle Autonomous Database to automate data integration and analyze IoT data in real time. The high performance autonomous database also includes multiple intuitive tools, such as Oracle APEX for low-code application development and Data Studio to easily load, transform, and build models for use in analytics.
Also, OCI Generative AI Agents combine the power of Large Language Models and retrieval-augmented generation to automate the search for equipment issues across the company’s knowledgebase.
OCI Generative AI Agents improved engineering productivity by 5X after MineSense automated the search for equipment issues across the company’s knowledgebase.
Results
After adopting Oracle Autonomous Data Warehouse, the company’s small IT team lowered DBA workloads by 65% and also tripled the company size and number of mining companies it supports in just four years. Oracle APEX allowed staff to rapidly build and deliver low-code apps in only one week instead of six. Oracle automated data integration further reduced the complexity of data workflows. Oracle APEX, Data Studio, and OCI Cloud Functions provided serverless compute that both reduced ETL processes and automated deployment of applications, allowing developers to focus on implementing business functionality.
OCI Interconnect for Azure helped the data science team tap existing Azure skill sets and machine learning tooling while keeping the data securely stored in OCI Autonomous Database. MineSense shares data with global customers using the Delta Share open protocol, minimizing compute usage and costs across public clouds. This also complements the existing Oracle REST Data Services (ORDS) APIs used by customers to access near real-time data collected from the mines.
Additionally, OCI Generative AI Agents help automate searching for equipment issues across the company’s knowledgebase, improving MineSense field engineering productivity by 5X. The combined power of Large Language Models and retrieval-augmented generation not only saved hundreds of hours per year in development and maintenance time, but also increased overall customer satisfaction.
About the customer
MineSense provides technology and data solutions that help mines increase output, efficiencies, and profitability, while minimizing environmental footprints across land, water, and energy use.