XII CONAMIN EPIROC – José Sánchez.

Last year, the company essentially offered nothing new, defining a new name. The board of directors decided to create a company separate from the parent, with $37 million in funding, 13,000 employees, present in 50 countries, and promising financial results. It has seven divisions, each led by a president. My division, based in Texas, focuses on surface mining, construction, and light mining, with a mission to develop technology ahead of its time. We've been involved in mining development in Sweden, with milestones like the process that revolutionized artisanal mining. We are developing innovations in automation for safety, asset utilization, connectivity, predictive maintenance, real-time positioning, and proactive decision-making. We also focus on sustainable mining, eliminating carbon footprint, battery-operated equipment, and mechanical rock excavation. We are in the era of digital transformation through AI, robotics, and global connectivity. This concept was reinforced in 2006. It's important to align the vision of how technology is changing our lives. We talk about the Internet of Things. Machines learn to analyze data and adjust operations, helping operators optimize productivity, detect failures, and improve work life. We believe this impact will be positive. We conducted a survey on autonomous mining; respondents think there is a revolution, but mining is conservative. However, innovation is being implemented over time. Smart mining means a fully connected value chain with real-time situational awareness for continuous cognitive decision-making, proactive optimization of resources, safety, predictability, and productivity. Without this, we may not extract resources safely and profitably in the future. By maximizing equipment utilization and availability with IoT, interoperability, and supply chain optimization from pit to port through analytics, we can take advantage of IoT. We are working on predictive maintenance, fleet management, and sequencing. We expect to achieve this soon with battery-operated projects. Optimization of drilling and blasting ensures consumables arrive at the right time. Qualification of crucial parameters is key. This technique will allow selection of flow. It will enable better working conditions and train the new workforce. Challenges include training operators to move from physical work to supervision and control. Currently, only 32% of the fleet is utilized; the rest is idle. If we increase real-time utilization, imagine how profitable operations could be. But we need the right data. How did we go from vision to reality? We started by organizing our new-generation equipment with a control system (RCS) on surface. We now have nearly 3,500 equipped with this platform. Then we added automation functions like auto-leveling, auto-drilling, and rod handling. Production increased 25–26% and utilization by 16%. Since 1998, we've automated functions to reduce dependency on operator experience. Fifteen years later, after four generations, we have software that provides operators and planning offices with data on all activities and time usage, enabling better decisions. The advantage of automation is predictable performance. Our mission is zero unplanned downtime. Since 1990, we have used USB memory to transfer data, then satellite communication, and now real-time data for operators to monitor and optimize. We moved from reactive to proactive mining. By increasing automatic functions, one operator can manage multiple equipment from a remote control room. This increases quality and reduces costs but still doesn't increase utilization until the operator is in a remote center. That's where we can increase asset utilization and production with fewer machines. Successes include improved safety—storms cause downtime, but we can operate outside the line of fire. Productivity increased, fuel consumption reduced by 20–30%. Ultimately, we have safer, more sustainable, and more productive mining. We have autonomous mining with four mines under one roof, 1,300 km apart, with 6 operators working 22 hours a day, previously only 18 hours. Productivity increased by 45%. These are tangible data. This transformation does not have a negative impact on cooperation. We move from manual to automatic to fully autonomous. Finally, we see how quickly automatic mining is developing across five continents with smarter mining.