Gauteng company GMSI, which forms part of GijimaAst Group, is an internationally recognised centre of excellence within the mining, metals and minerals industry, says GMSI marketing manager Empie Strydom.

“Our vision is to be the leading provider of enterprise mining solutions and we plan to achieve this by leveraging on the range of niche mining technical solutions which we have developed. “We aim to provide solutions for the entire mining value chain, as well as those services which are required to bring value out of the technology investment made,” he says.

“We combine technology and mining consulting with business consulting. This means that one can acquire systems that fit their business, whatever kind of mining business it is,” says Strydom.

The company offers a mix of both consulting services and mine technical solutions to the mining industry.

Its experience is varied, with clients in underground hard rock, potash, flat tabular mining, and open pit operations.
“Our strength as a company and partner is in how we add value to a client’s operation, through a mixture of mining and business consulting in the areas of professional mining consulting, management consulting, technical solutions consulting, data mining and enterprise risk management,” says Strydom.

GMSI mining executive Mike Woodall, with a background in mining engineering, says that the company integrates the two disciplines of mining and information technology to serve the mining industry.

“As a leader in the mining technical systems field, we have a well-developed and articulated growth strategy with three strategic thrusts.

“The first level of growth is horizontally across the value chain, the second is vertically across the information hierarchy, while the third level is geographical growth across the globe. We want to be able to service our clients wherever mining is active. In the centre of those three elements, is our mineRP framework, which is the framework around which we hang all our technical systems, and around which we define our future” says Woodall.

mineRP is about sharing information across the enterprise by employ- ing spatialDB and spatialDash. These components enable seamless interdisciplinary integration and visualisation of information from the planning room to the boardroom.

“If we look horizontally across the mining value chain, we have for many years used our locally developed value chain diagram to which we are able to add roles and responsibilities and the applications we have to offer the mining industry,” says Woodall. “More recently, in the past year or two, we have been involved with the Open Group in creating a generic model, which can be used globally. It defines mining as a process through three levels using gene- ric terminology, which we can take any- where in the world.”

The company’s growth will also be in the vertical space of the information hierarchy, which refers to the point right at the source where data is created, for example, an underground sample or in the planning room, right through to collecting all the operational data and being able to report on that at whatever organisa- tional level is required.

Lastly, in terms of its geographical growth strategy, GMSI will expand its activities to areas such as the US and Indonesia to complement its well-established offices in South Africa, Australia and Canada, as well as the recently opened Istanbul and Santiago offices.

“Over the years, we have serviced clients in 52 countries, and our products are running on mines in 34 countries worldwide,” says Strydom.

“We have teams in Australia and South Africa constantly working on the development of new software functionality, and given our consulting and implementation capabilities elsewhere, we effectively have 24/7 coverage, which we offer to our global client base, so at any time of day we can receive a phone call for assistance and we have people available to answer that,” he says.

Woodall explains that the people who work at GMSI are a combination of infor- mation technology- (IT-) savvy mining people and mining-savvy IT people.

“We have an in-depth understanding of the mining business and we are able to facilitate conversations between miners, who understand their business as functional silos, and the IT person, who understands business as data.”

As a wholly owned subsidiary of GijimaAst Group, GMSI benefits from its access to the resources and capabili- ties of a large publicly listed company with 3 900 staff and 70 offices globally.

This backing provides GMSI with the scale and capability to undertake corpo- rate system deployments and provide ongoing services to the very largest of global mining enterprises. It can facilitate long-term partnerships spanning the interwoven world of technical, IT and business process problems.