acQuire Connected episode 46: What is GIM Essentials?

With mining companies producing more data than ever before, the challenge has shifted from collecting it to extracting reliable and actionable insights from it.

As new technologies such as sensors, aerial imagery and AI-assisted data capture tools flood the industry with information, getting the right data to the surface has become both more challenging and more critical for making confident decisions and supporting the growing global demand for critical and vital minerals.

In the latest acQuire Connected podcast episode, Charl Retief, Mining Leader at acQuire, explores:

• the challenge of data-rich but information-poor environments,
• why aligning people, process and technology is critical for better business outcomes,
• the role of acQuire’s new solution, GIM Essentials, in helping more companies access to reliable data management,
• the differences between GIM Suite and GIM Essentials, and
• how acQuire’s GIM Solutions will continue to support customers tackling their complex information management challenges into the future.

Listen to the full episode with Charl Retief below.

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Read the full transcript here:

Jaimee Nobbs (00:00): Welcome to acQuire Connected, the podcast that is your compass in the world of data across environmental, social, and governance. Welcome to the acQuire Connected podcast. I’m Jaimee Nobbs, your host for this episode, and today we’re joined by Charl Retief, our mining value stream leader here at acQuire.

In today’s chat, we discussed the challenges that mining companies are up against when managing their geological data, the way the people, process and technology framework can impact a business, particularly when one gets out of alignment with the others. And most excitingly, we discussed the launch of acQuire’s new product GIM Essentials; why we developed it, who it’s built for and how it can support more mining companies managing their geological data. This is also our last episode for season three. We will be back later in the year with more episodes, so stay tuned by subscribing to the podcast or signing up to our monthly newsletter to be the first to hear of when we’re back for season four. That’s enough from me. Let’s get into the episode.

Thank you for joining us. To start off with, can you tell us a bit about yourself, your background, and your role at acQuire?

Charl Retief (01:10): Well, yeah, so I’ll start with my background and how I ended up where I am with acQuire today. So, originally from South Africa, grew up in Johannesburg on the outskirts in a small town. And during my school years we often were taught that we had the highest manmade mountains in our town and we were very proud of those and those were actually mine dumps. I didn’t grow up in a family that was involved with mining in any respect, so I didn’t actually know much about the mining industry, and so I never actually anticipated that I would eventually end up spending most of my career in the mining industry. So I ended up going to university and studying geosciences, completing a degree in Geoinformatics, which is really a combination of geosciences and information sciences and started working in that space. And that wasn’t in mining at that point in time.

It was really geospatial-focused in the work I did and more around infrastructure management and aerial photography. And eventually landed a job with a small junior mining exploration company based out of Johannesburg. And that’s really where my journey started in the mining industry. At the time, I was the holistic information manager for all that geoscience data. So implemented my first geological database back in the day for that company, as well as managing all the other geological maps and aerial photography and geophysics data. Travelled the world in that capacity, not just for that company, but actually as I moved on from that company through to consulting houses, working for a mining major and most of it was exploration focused and ended up being an acquire customer and implemented as it was called back in the day, acquire and managed acquire databases for a while. And from there I actually transitioned over to software companies, joined Esri That really sort of shifted my focus towards the intersection of technology and business, and so working for a software company really sort of fed into that passion for me. So still doing that, but being focused on geosciences in the mining space. I did a deviation into the world of cybersecurity. I worked for a cybersecurity startup, which was an amazing experience, an incredibly technical space. Got exposure to other industries as well and seeing similar challenges in some respects, but also different ones. So that was a great experience. And so yeah, for the past five years I’ve been with acQuire. And when I joined acQuire, I was based in Johannesburg, heading up the EMEA region for a choir and transitioned over managing both EMEA and Asia Pacific regions. And then at the moment, I am responsible for the global mining business for acQuire. So that’s a long introduction, but hopefully it gives you good sense of my journey to date.

Jaimee Nobbs (04:31): It does. It sounds like you’ve had a lot of exposure to a lot of different pieces of software, the industry as a whole from all different angles, and I think the cybersecurity aspect as well is quite interesting because that’s one that we’re seeing just greater importance on now more than ever. So it sounds like you’ve really kind of dabbled in all the different sectors and all the different aspects of the industry, customer side, and now the software side as well. In that time, how have you seen the mining and resources industry change specifically when you look at the way that they manage data?

Charl Retief (05:08): Well, it has and it hasn’t. I think in some respects, many of the challenges that existed when I first joined the industry are still around. I think many organisations are still data-rich, but information-poor. So there’s many companies that spend a lot of money on producing more data, more sensors, more aerial photography, even more recent times AI-generated or AI-assisted data capturing tools. There’s just been this massive proliferation of data generation, and it’s not as if companies have yet solved the problem well enough. I think there’s been advancements in the right direction around how do they actually maximise the value out of spending so much money on collecting this data. And so even 15 years ago, when I spent quite a bit of time on trying to solve this problem of disparate data in the mining organisation, there was a big push of finding a platform or finding some layer that actually integrates data from all different sources.

And the industry is still grappling with that, and there are many reasons for it. The mining industry is different to other industries in my view, from the perspective of its an industry of industries, if I can say it like that. So there are many different disciplines, engineering disciplines, geoscience disciplines, technology disciplines that are actually involved in the mining industry. So having all those disciplines and it’s such a complex space is really challenging to wrap your head around for companies to then look at data and how do they maximise the value of the data for good business decisions. I think that in some ways that challenge still exists.

Jaimee Nobbs (07:11): So it’s the proliferation of data and how we collect it and how we analyse it, there have been slight changes, but essentially it is a challenge we’ve been facing for a long time. This has raised a thought around PDAC this year and in our panel discussion, the industry speakers spoke about how the better way to make decisions is to collect more data. Do you agree with that? Do you think there’s a point where there are going to be companies collecting too much data when you consider how it needs to be managed, or do you not really see that as an issue?

Charl Retief (07:48): That’s an interesting view. I’m not sure I support it and it needs to be contextualised. And what I mean is when you look at large language models in the AI space, those large language models perform better when they have more data thrown at them. However, you can throw a bunch of nonsensical unvalidated untrustworthy data at this large language model and it will give you the wrong answers. So yes, the way to ensure that you statistically reduce the errors in what an AI model gives you, you need to give it more data, but it needs to be reliable data as well. So I think that comment that was made at the panel discussion at PAC was more aligned with the intent of, well, what is needed for AI models to work and be more valuable within an exploration context so that target generation can happen faster, but again, ultimately when a mining company decides to drill a hole, they decide to spend money and they commit to several thousands of dollars.

And so they need to decide why they draw that hole. Are they testing a negative hypothesis or are they testing a positive hypothesis? And that’s a geological hypothesis. So the industry can’t be using their money to ground truth through drilling and sampling as a means to determine whether an AI model is reliable. The AI model needs to be reliable and therefore it needs validated trustworthy data. So I think there is a real risk for companies to generate too much data. I think it’s been happening for a while even, and it’s just the right data is not bubbling up to the surface to present itself as valuable information. And that’s an ongoing challenge.

Jaimee Nobbs (09:52): It’s not just the technology that you’ve raised there, but also the geologist role and the processes around mining. If we look at the people process and technology framework at acquire, that’s something we talk about regularly. It’s not just the technology that needs to work, everything needs to work together. How do you see them working together when it comes to something like effective geoscientific information management and creating that reliable, trustworthy data?

Charl Retief (10:23): Yeah, so acQuire has been promoting the concept of people processing technology for a very long time, and it’s actually something that we’ve borrowed from enterprise architecture principles. And so where enterprise architecture is the whole field of how do you design your technology landscape in a way that it enables the business for a large organisation or even a small organisation, but it’s really this intersection between your technology systems from a software perspective and the business architecture and the business itself. And so the way you bring those things together is through this approach of combining people, processes and technology. And GIM Suite is an enterprise solution by nature in its architecture, it cuts across different geoscience disciplines. It’s used by multiple users. If you look at the technology architecture and the way we implement GIM Suite, you can very quickly see that it is a typical enterprise solution, much like an ERP solution that you find out there. It’s just focused on a different area within a business. So people processing technology is actually then an organisational capability where the right people working and interacting with the system according to a workflow carries information through that process from one point to another to other people. And there’s a technology environment underneath that that supports that business process and that supports that people piece where they interact with it. And in some cases, the different people that interact with the system along that business process need more or less training on the actual technology environment.

Jaimee Nobbs (12:19): It basically needs to be a balance of all three. It can’t just be one working without the other. The people need to be upskilled and trained. They need to be following processes and workflows, and the technology needs to be there to support them. What happens if one of those isn’t up to scratch or isn’t up to the same standard as the other? What impact does that create in a business?

Charl Retief (12:42): Well, yeah, if they get out of kilter with each other effectively.

Jaimee Nobbs (12:47): Yeah.

Charl Retief (12:48): Well, I think that’s where you do run into several challenges depending on where the overemphasis is or where the lacking aspects are with regards to one of those three. So for example, if you don’t have enough or well enough trained people to interact with the system, then the investment into that technology will not really reduce its full value and benefit to the business.

At the same time, if the technology itself is experienced as inhibiting certain people to do their jobs well, there may be lots of frustration that comes. And so you’ve got to look at it from a local and overall optimum perspective. So some people may say, Hey, okay, when I do this, I get really frustrated. But when you stand back and you then introduce the process picture, well look, when you do this, it’s only part of a much bigger business process and we are looking at optimising the much bigger business process for the sake of business results and business outcomes. So you may feel like it’s constraining here, but we have to constrain it here so that there’s an optimum across the bigger process. And that balance, you’ve got to balance that to really focus on the business intended and the business outcome. And that’s really the difference between arguably consumer technology and enterprise technology is you’ve got to really think about what are the business processes that are enabled by this technology and how can you optimise those business processes and workflows with the technology? If you don’t do that, then yeah, there’s frustration that happens if the processes itself are lacking, you may start experiencing errors in your data, your data confidence goes down several things that can go wrong there in terms of the quality and reliability of what you base your decisions on. And yeah, I mean the technology is the enabler of it all. So if the technology is not enabling whatever level of process you have, you’re not going to find the business outcomes you’re looking for.

Jaimee Nobbs (15:01): That leads really nicely into my next question, which is about a product we’ve recently launched. Now in terms of technology supporting people with this new product acquire has seen, I guess a way to support a wider range of customers. Can you tell us about the new product GIM Essentials and I guess how we got to a position from Acquire having a flagship enterprise solution GIM Suite for so many years and now understanding that market so well and seeing a gap. Can you tell me a little bit about GIM Essentials and how you see it, I guess, fitting into the market as a whole and where you see its ability to support customers?

Charl Retief (15:49): Oh yeah, I’m glad you asked this question because it’s actually super exciting for us. GIM Essentials has been in the making for actually a long time. And so about two and a half, three years ago, we really set out to be a lot more deliberate about building a solution for this segment of the market, which has now resulted in us launching GIM Essentials. So to be a bit more specific about where we’ve seen the gap in the market and where we aiming and focusing GIM Essentials, I think it’s really important that you made the point around GIM Suite being the enterprise solution and the flagship. So GIM Essentials actually stands alongside GIM Suite, where GIM Suite will remain our flagship solution focused on the larger mining enterprises with multiple sites, hundreds of users, very complex operating environments. But we’ve also noticed and known for a long time that there’s a portion in the market if you kind of go to the metier companies that are underserved, we’ve known that GIM Suite isn’t an appropriate solution for that part of the market just because of the fact that it’s an enterprise solution.

And so we also have observed that some of the solutions that play in that space of the market, the mid-market so to speak, don’t actually necessarily cover all the requirements from a geological data management perspective. So when you look at it from planned drill holes through to core logging as a importation, well before that, even dispatching and QAQC, so the whole process and the whole flow, some of the other solutions on the market does some of these things quite well. Some of them are a bit patchy. So we’ve just really set out to build a solution that comprehensively covers the foundational elements of good data management aimed at the metier market, and more specifically at those companies that are looking to do resource and reserve development with big drilling programmes kicking off soon. And so for us, it’s a really time moment to actually release GIM Essentials, particularly if you consider some of the macro themes that are prevailing in the world around us.

So even at PDAC, it was a big emphasis of many of the keynote speakers, but even if you just read a little bit about what’s going on in the world out there. So there are some major societal themes that really is pushing an increased demand for not just critical minerals, but I’d like to call it vital minerals. And there’s a known huge gap between the current ability of the mining industry to produce the required minerals to support technology advancement, particularly associated with AI, the increase in electricity requirements, building those GPUs, mass urbanisation, electrification of transportation networks. Those macro trends just really are pushing the demands on vital minerals. And so mining companies and the mining industry as a whole is under real pressure to find new mines quicker, faster, and extract those minerals out of the ground quicker and faster. And that’s really where GIM Essential shines is getting up quickly, helping those companies that need to draw a potential resource quickly so that they can make reliable decisions.

Jaimee Nobbs (19:30): What I take away from that is it’s more the mid-tier resource development space. It’s not replacing GIM Suite, is that correct?

Charl Retief (19:38): Not at all. That’s correct.

Jaimee Nobbs (19:41): And so you’ve kind of talked about the way that GIM Essentials is set up is to support the workflow for the mineral resources space. How do you see GIM Essentials helping teams in the field or onsite? Can you give us an example of what it actually looks like, I guess in its working form, once a company takes it on, what should they expect? What problems will it help them solve?

Charl Retief (20:03): Yeah, so I would definitely recommend listeners to this podcast to actually go navigate to the GIM Essentials landing page so that they can see the actual technology and product interface reach out to one of our team members to actually see a demonstration of the product. But to answer your question, we’ve designed GIM Essentials as a hosted solution. So it’s entirely managed by Acquire. It runs in a cloud environment across several data centres globally, and every customer will have their own dedicated, secure, private instance where that instance and GIM Essentials as a front end can be to that specific mineral project. So in terms of data validation, styling standards, reference codes and the like, however, we’ve deliberately reduced its configuration capability so that we can contain it the target market we focusing on. So it’s not as configurable as GIM Suite. And so it’s not an appropriate solution for early stage greenfields exploration, for example, where you have lots of variability in your workflows where it really solves a problem or it solves several problems actually.

And that’s firstly because it’s a hosted solution, we can deploy it very quickly. We can spin up a customer instance within a matter of days, we can configure that and they can start capturing their data within a matter of days, which is a big problem solver because typically those teams are smaller, they have many other balls they need to juggle other than just managing geological data. And so they don’t have to go and spend time on thinking about, oh, what does a good core logging workflow look like for us? GIM Essentials provides it already. All they need to tell us is what standards, validations and codes they want. We configure it, they can start capturing it. So spining up very quickly having predefined workflows. It runs on, there’s a native fully integrated mobile application, so your core loggers out in the field at the rig or in the core shed can capture core on the application on the mobile app.

And the mobile app fully adheres to all the validation and standards that’s been configured. So at the point of data capture, everything is already consistent from a data perspective and a data standards and governance point of view, and it seamlessly then pushes back into the central data store of GIM Essentials. That’s then available to all the other users that can interact the web interface. So it solves that problem too from making sure that you’ve got reliable data captured in the field and secondly, solve the problem of having validated data at the point of capture. So those are some of the key things we’ve addressed with GIM Essentials that we know that typically that sort of segment of the market struggles with. I think another thing that we were really cognizant of is that typical customers of GIM Essentials would not have dedicated database managers, and so we built GIM Essentials with that in mind so that you don’t need to be trained, you don’t have to go on training courses, you don’t need to be a trained database manager. You can do other things managing your drilling programme. You can be an exploration geologist, a project geologist, exploration manager, you can do all those other things that you need to do plus then also use GIM Essentials without needing prior training. And obviously we have then built our support network around Essentials in the same way that GIM Suite has been known for.

Jaimee Nobbs (24:03): What have we actually learned from GIM Suite in terms of the way we’ve structured GIM Essentials? Is there the same kind of rigour around data validation and reliability in GIM Essentials as we expect and we have in GIM Suite?

Charl Retief (24:21): Yeah, absolutely. And I think if you come back to some of the earlier questions and discussion points around so much data, too much data, reliable data, making good decisions, as an information management company, it’s really important for us that whatever product we put out there that it’s still adheres to those fundamental requirements. And so Jim Essentials is actually built on the same underlying architecture as Jim Suite, particularly when you look at the data model and the geoscience business logic that sits on top of that data model so that we can still adhere to the same foundational principles within that niche space of data collection, data management, data governance and dissemination.

Jaimee Nobbs (25:12): Fantastic. I think it’s a really exciting product and I think a lot of people will get good value out of it. You’ve mentioned where people can go to get more information, so the GIM Essentials landing page, there’s demos and obviously the team if they’ve got more questions about it. So I will put all of that into the show notes that people can just click on it straight away. They don’t have to go searching for it. In terms of Geoscientific information Management as a whole, though, I know GIM Essentials is one of two products that you are overseeing in the mining value stream at Acquire. So I do have one final question for you, and it’s more as a whole looking at supporting the mining industry as mining operations continue to evolve, how will our Geoscientific information management solutions, so both GIM Suite and GIM Essentials continue to support customers tackling their complex information management challenges into the future?

Charl Retief (26:17): Yeah, I think overarchingly, it’s this notion of the free flow of validated reliable data into GIM essentials and or GIM Suite, and from GIM Essentials or GIM Suite, to other parts so that when we come back to this topic of people processing technology and you stand back and you look and go, well, you’ve got your data management solution, but then you’ve got also other systems in the bigger landscape, how do they all play a part? And so GIM Suite and GIM Essentials play a very specific and pivotal part in the bigger information landscape of a mining organisation. And so for us, it’s important that our products facilitate that free flow of validated data into and out of our solutions, and we will continue to go down that path of building out integration and connectivity capabilities of our solution with themselves, with the ancillary applications around them, with our own solutions and with key partners, technology partners in the industry.

Jaimee Nobbs (27:30): Perfect. That sounds very exciting. We’ve got a lot to come. As we’ve said before, there is a lot of information on the website now about GIM Essentials, so head on over there to check it out. And thank you so much Charl for joining.

Charl Retief (27:45): Thank you, Jaimee

Jaimee Nobbs (27:48): Thanks for listening to this episode of acQuire Connected. If you found this episode valuable and we hope you did, don’t forget to click subscribe so you never miss a conversation. We’d love your feedback too. So leave us a rating or review and share the episode with anyone you think might find this valuable as well. We will see you soon for the next season of acQuire Connected. Thanks for listening to the acQuire Connected podcast channel. Find us at acQuire.com au.