The challenge is understanding the impact (economic and non-economic) to the business as a whole and assessing the impact dynamically. The ability to use a whole of business (WoB) value modelling approach to understand issues like operational debottlenecking, life of mine opportunity trade-offs and change management implications is critical to whether proposed value is overstated.
Mining3 has taken a whole of business, value driver tree modelling approach to assessing the new technology and methodologies. Utilising a top-down approach (with adequate levels of lower-level high-impact), we are developing a plug-and-play modular modeling structure, comprised of four main modules covering financial, production, task allocation and utilisation models.
In a hierarchical structure, in which the utilisation model (the lowest level set of inputs) flows into the highest-level model (the financial model) that contains familiar financial metrics including cash flow, net present value and internal rate of return.
By building out the model from the top down, customisation is possible where a generic model can be applied to any mine and swiftly adapted for use on other mines by simply plugging in and plugging out modules.
Once a modular based model is built, data at the lowest level of the value drivers, such as equipment capacity, utilisation, and commodity costs, will flow up to the high-level business case.
By utilising ranges of inputs rather than static inputs, the capability of sensitivity and attribution analyses is unlocked, where small variances in a low-level input can be tracked through the model in a series of scenarios where the impact of the change of an input is quantified using stochastic or Monte Carlo style analyses.
