Software solutions provider Mintec will showcase several new products at this year’s Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada event.

Mintec president John Davies tells Mining Weekly that one of the exciting new products to be featured is MineSight Implicit Modeler, which is a mathematical tool that enables geologists to take drillhole data, polygonal data, point data and fault plane data, and rapidly interpret new geological scenarios.

“One of the most time-consuming tasks for a geologist is building up a reasonable three-dimensional picture of the deposit. The traditional methods of linking polygons and polylines from section to section are still probably the most accurate method, but MineSight Implicit Modeler will let you develop rapid alternatives to your problem, and come up with quick solutions and rapid alternatives to looking at the geological structures,” says Davies.

Also on show will be MineSight Performance Manager (MSPM), which, using specialised dashboards and visualisations not only assesses and reports on mining performance in near real time, but provides the analytical tools necessary to answer why something happened. Instead of time- consuming, retrospective analyses with spreadsheets, MSPM offers quick solutions to improve processes.

Davies reports that the company has expanded upon its popular interactive planning tools to create an interactive product with Gantt scheduling and activity scheduling built in. Known as MineSight Atlas, it offers a complete package for manual scheduling and stockpile blending. Using MineSight Core’s powerful computer-aided design (CAD) tools and visualisation, MineSight Atlas directly accesses multiple block models, making mine areas for openpit and underground mining easy to manage.

Also, the new MineSight Stope tool within its design section allows users to develop rapid alternatives to underground stoping options. Not only is it a design tool, but it is a quick first-pass scheduling tool for underground engineers to look at alter- natives for a stope location.

Other products to be showcased include MineSight Reserve, which unifies the consolidated power of MineSight’s reserve engines and features a completely integrated reserve calculation and reporting engine; MineSight Dump Design, which designs dumps and stockpiles, targeting a specified volume; MineSight Surface Resloping Tool, an invaluable addition to MineSight 3D’s Engineering Open Pit CAD, enabling engineers to reduce a shape (such as a waste dump) to a desired final slope while balancing cut and fill; MineSight Sub-Blocking, which extends MineSight model files to convey detailed information along, for example, contact boundaries of geologic zones; and Model Center, which initialises and manages models directly from MineSight 3D.

In addition to new products, the company will also be showing off numerous improvements to some of its flagship products, including MineSight 3D, MineSight Torque, MineSight Schedule Optimizer, MineSight Strategic Planner, MineSight Haulage, MineSight Basis and MineSight Economic Planner.

Davies reports that the global company has had a Vancouver office since 1987, although it undertook consulting in the 1970s in Canada and has had clients of the software since the early 1980s.

“We have had great success in providing software to model the complex coal (Rocky Mountain) market. The majority of coal clients in the Rockies in British Columbia/Alberta use MineSight and this is a significant portion of our Canadian business,” says Davies.

“In Western Canada, we are a major provider of software to the industry, with almost all the coal mines, and a good percentage of the metals mines, using MineSight. Eastern Canada is where we see the growth opportunities.”

The main services provided by the Canadian offices are client support, sales, training and software development.

Looking ahead in the Canadian market, Davies says the company has a vision of continued growth and support for existing clients.

“We also have a wide range of new products coming out in early 2013 that we will be marketing to new and existing clients. We are putting a lot of effort into developing more tools for underground mining, including some advanced scheduling tools. From sub-blocked modelling, to stope design, to activity-based scheduling, we will have a whole new set of tools that will be practical and useful for underground mining clients. This will be our entry into the Eastern Canadian market,” says Davies.

Visit Mintec at PDAC 2013 at booth #904.