Unlocking New Value in Mining with Cordant™ 

Establish predictable performance while managing costs 

The mining industry is at a critical juncture. A rising demand for raw materials supporting the energy transition, increasing cost pressures, higher regulatory and compliance requirements, and a shortage of skilled labor are just some of the challenges driving the need for transformation.  

In such a dynamic environment, mining organisations must develop agility, while finding ways to extract more value from their existing assets and resources. Achieving this relies on their ability to embrace emerging technologies that enable dynamic improvement processes to not only drive productivity gains and cost-efficiencies, but unlock new opportunities. 

Baker Hughes is one company helping asset owners navigate these challenges while balancing factors such as risk, cost, and performance. 

The company’s Cordant™ suite of solutions is specifically designed to improve asset, process, energy and sustainability performance.  

Baker Hughes’ Vice President of Solutions and Product Management for Cordant™, Jason Apps, explained that Cordant™ addresses the many difficulties mining organisations face when it comes to managing their assets and gaining visibility over their large-scale processes. 

“Organisations often have disparate domain-based processes, systems, technical solutions, and teams across functions like asset reliability and strategy, asset health and condition monitoring, integrity, defect elimination and work management,” he said. 

“The challenge is that they have had no way to connect these domains and data silos to get a true overarching view of their operations and drive continuous improvement.” 

Apps added that Cordant™ solves this challenge by combining health, strategy, integrity, and defect elimination capabilities into an integrated environment for a complete and quantified view of asset related risk and cost opportunity. 

“Leveraging advanced analytics and connected data sets, Cordant™ also drives insight-led decision making and actions which can be leveraged across an entire asset base. 

“As it’s a modular and composable solution, it’s capabilities can be seamlessly expanded as operational needs and processes evolve.  

 An Integrated Approach that Optimises Asset Performance

With an unprecedented level of uncertainty in today’s rapidly changing and increasingly competitive environment, it’s critical that organisations have reliable and efficient IT infrastructure in place to manage complex data streams and processes. 

Yet, many organisations face a common challenge: siloed functions, systems, and data. 

In asset management, this is reflected by the disconnect between asset strategy, asset health, integrity, defect elimination, and work management. The lack of data integration between these domains creates inefficiencies. and makes it difficult to quantify risks in real-time and make decisions about how to prioritise resources. It is even more difficult to forward manage risks and drive continuous improvement across distributed assets. 

“That’s why an integrated Asset Performance Management (APM) approach is so important in mining where we have large fleets and simple operations such that connected and consistent data sets can drive real throughput increases,” said Apps. 

“It digitally connects the traditionally siloed functions of asset management, enabling organisations to demonstrate compliance, reduce risk, manage costs, and deliver predictable performance. It also provides a comprehensive view of asset health and risk, accounting for asset age, operating condition, maintenance plans, and strategy compliance.” 

Apps added that aside from helping organisations prioritise activities to manage cost and risk, an integrated approach also supports continuous improvement of asset care and reliability. It connects dynamic asset models to all like assets, supporting standardization yet individualised strategies based on specific operational context. 

“For example, any operating context or asset changes can be reflected in asset strategies and monitoring applications in real-time. Connection to the Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) application and work management process drives any changes through to work execution in the field. The result is a dynamic and agile approach to equipment maintenance and reliability, in sync with operational goals.” 

 Unleashing Opportunities for Mine Operators

In mining, the power of Cordant™ can’t be underestimated. It features several dedicated, connected applications that secure critical insights to help customers adapt to change, and prioritise activities to manage risk, reduce costs, and generate higher productivity and product yield. 

“The first core benefit that Cordant™ offers miners is the ability to effectively manage risk across all mobile and fixed plant assets,” commented Apps. 

“It identifies areas of significant risk in alignment with corporate risk frameworks and current risk appetite. Organisations can then prioritise proactive and corrective work based on dynamic risk-based asset health assessment and drive consistency in asset monitoring and asset maintenance plans to manage risk” 

In terms of cost reduction, Cordant™ helps lower cost per tonne by aligning  asset strategies in real-time for cost-effective maintenance on all mobile and fixed plant assets. It also reduces unplanned failures and downtime through advanced anomaly and degradation detection and management and improved  spare parts holding based on predicted requirements. 

With these structured data sets, global fleets can be managed with dynamic connected models that consolidate and build asset intelligence that enables fleet wide improvements.  

“Mine operators will benefit from a holistic improvement in asset performance,” said Apps. “This includes increased production and throughput via AI simulation-based optimisation, as well as reduced downtime through sophisticated asset health monitoring and proactive asset strategies.” 

Significant productivity gains can also be achieved as a result of greater operational agility. Sophisticated insights drive workflows that maximise the value delivered from onsite or remote program managers  

From a process optimisation perspective, mine operators can expect improved product yield and quality, and optimised processes when solving complex, real-time problems. 

Finally, there’s the positive impact on sustainability and realised long-term value to mining operations. Cordant™ offers rich insights on energy consumption and emissions, enabling informed, sustainability-led decision making. Further improvements are acquired via process driven assessment, improvement, and quantification based on scalable sensors and edge devices. 

To remain competitive in the longer-term mining organisations need to master the ability to leverage a common global asset base using fleet principles, deploy AI driven anomaly detection, automatically and use action-oriented insights to drive productivity and agility. Cordant™ works within an organisation to drive seamless performance improvement working in harmony with existing systems and technologies to deliver real value uplift. 

To learn more about Cordant™ and how to improve your productivity and operational agility, visit www.bakerhughes.com/cordant