There is more data at our fingertips now than at any point in human history. Steve Franklin, founder of Eltirus, asks the question: how much does this flood of data help us?

Whether in business, or in life broadly, our ability to act is primarily determined by our understanding of the situation around us. You could further say that that understanding is built up of data, turned into knowledge which then helps us to understand that which is happening around us and facilitate action.

Let’s try and break that down to a simple example. If I am driving my car down the road and the oil pressure light comes on, I know that I have at best thirty seconds to bring the car to a safe halt and turn off the engine or it will seize up (no engine oil pressure = no lubrication), resulting in a very expensive repair.

In this example, data (oil pressure) has been turned into information (current oil pressure vs. expected oil pressure) to provide me with what I am going to term “actionable information”.

You will note that I am not calling it understanding as without some training or experience, the actionable information might be ignored, and the engine will fail as a consequence.

Let’s now look at this in a little more detail.

Data

Data and information are often used interchangeably, but they are not the same thing. Data are raw facts or figures that can be collected, measured, or observed.

As an example, a modern car will continually analyse the engine oil pressure (among some fifty to one hundred other variables) on a continual basis. Can you imagine if these were continuously streamed across the instrument panel as you drove the car. It would at best be meaningless and at worst, a distraction.

That said, the raw data must be collected. If the oil pressure sensor stopped recording (and the system didn’t flag it), eventually a situation could occur where this lack of data could result in a seized engine.

Data collection is important.

Information

Information is the result of processing, interpreting, or organizing data in a meaningful way. For example, a list of numbers is data, but a chart that shows the trend of those numbers is information.

Continuing the oil pressure analogy, the data coming in needs to be turned into information by validating it. For example, engine oil pressure can vary by around 50 per cent depending on oil temperature and how hard the engine is working (amongst other factors). If by way of example the normal, operating oil pressure should be in the range of 350kpa (50 psi), readings of 2,000kPa should be disregarded by the system as outliers, but should be logged as a potential issue with the sensor for maintenance to investigate.

Contextualisation of data helps to turn it into information.

As noted above, you must be able to make sense of the information presented to you. Many older machines that had mechanical/electric gauges often helped contextualise the data by providing a green and red shaded area behind the needle – a simple and effective approach. Do you need to know the exact oil pressure, or do you need to know if it isn’t in an acceptable range?

Actionable information

Given how much information the average quarry operation generates, some real thought needs to go into what is actionable information and what is not. Perhaps an appropriate way to consider it is, if you can do something with that piece of information to change, improve or prevent something happening (to the betterment of the operation), then it is valuable as it is a ‘lever’ of some kind to help steer and guide and could be considered actionable information.

But what if you don’t understand either the significance of the oil pressure light coming on or how long you have to act even if you did? The result is the same – a seized engine.

I suspect that what we are discussing here is really that elusive quality – “common sense”, which we could define ‘as having actionable information, knowing its importance and what to do with it (and acting of course!).

By way of example. Many of you will be aware that modern machines often have (for want of a better term) a ‘black box recorder’ that the dealer (or maintenance team) can access in the event of a catastrophic failure or accident to better understand what happened. One of my favourite examples of this type of analysis was a Cat 789 haul truck that seized the engine. You could play back the data and see the point the oil pressure light came on, at which point the throttle position returned to zero (the operator saw the warning light), then see it go back to full throttle and the oil pressure continue to drop as the engine temperature went up, until the engine failed catastrophically.

Why? Because the operator decided that as it was a hot day, he would rather take the truck back to the crib room than pull over straight away (and save the engine). You can guess that the supervisory and management teams thoughts on the operators reasoning were likely unprintable. But whether through wilfulness or ignorance, the failure occurred despite the information being available to prevent the disaster.

One could say that the moral of the story is that ensuring that staff have either the training or experience needed to turn information into action is vital to getting the right result.

Turning actionable information into action

Since starting the quarry digital transformation initiative in 2017, we have worked to ensure that we provide our clients with actionable information, whether that be in the areas of survey, geological, geotechnical or quarry engineering.

Some two years ago we noticed that many of our clients had an increasing amount of data available to them but were not using it.

It prompted us to start looking for systems that could pull data together from multiple sources and surprisingly, we didn’t really find what we were looking for. As a result, we started development of a system that could do just that – pull in data from disparate systems and turn it into actionable information.

Available broadly from February 2024, we call this system Eltirus Enable. It has now been in day-to-day use with one of the largest quarries in the region for some twelve months and has continually proved its worth in helping site and senior management to make more predictive and less reactive decisions.

So, what is it? Simply put, a secure, easy to use system that can pull data out of other systems using an API, that can replace paper-based forms with electronic forms on ruggedised tablets, bring in data from spreadsheets as needed and then validate and contextualise the data for you.

Modules include sales, stocks, drill and blast, load and haul, crush and screen, quality, environment and energy. As you can imagine, what is actionable to a supervisor is different to a general manager and so the system has different views of the information depending on what is relevant to the specific role. Likewise, from a commercial perspective, data relevant to a senior manager would not be made available to a supervisor.

Does it replace other systems? Not really, if you wanted to drill down into the raw data, the best place to do so is in the respective vendor system – you can instead think of Eltirus Enable as your operational Executive Summary.

For more information about Eltirus Enable and how it can benefit your quarry operations, contact us here.