Melbourne Microsoft partner deploys Azure for offshore mining operation

Melbourne-headquartered Australian exploration and mining company Laguna Gold sought to gain more insights into a Chilean mine it acquired in 2016 while using a system that would scale as it grows.

When Laguna bought the El Toqui zinc-gold-silver and lead mine in southern Chile from multinational resources company Nyrstar, it was running an instance of SAP used almost exclusively to manage finances, which Laguna Gold wanted to take to into the Microsoft Azure cloud.

Melbourne-based SAP consultant and Microsoft partner Acclimation was tapped for the deployment, with Laguna Gold looking to improve SAP’s enterprise visibility and enable improved organisational agility, flexibility and data-driven decision making in real time using other cloud features.

Laguna Gold wanted a platform that was able to support IoT technology to provide a real-time view of operations and take advantage of the El Toqui mine and processing plant’s data-rich environment.

The migration to Azure also aimed to provide the company with global connectivity, with a team of about 500 people working onsite in southern Chile being managed by a nine-person Australia-based executive team.

“We’re a lean operation with a small IT team so when something goes wrong we need to be able to call on our strategic partners,” Laguna Gold executive general manager of IT Brian Reynolds said.

“And I’m glad to say, certainly in the last 12 months, I don’t think we’ve had a technical issue. Certainly, we haven’t had an outage.”

The mine is also being supported by multiple vendor partners providing specialised services across logistics, transport, metallurgical services, specialised drilling contractors.

The company has now transitioned its service tools and risk management to Azure, and said it was already benefiting from the information it was getting. Reynolds said the improved asset management system would see quantifiable benefits moving forward.

“We were very pleased with the outcome the teams delivered,” Acclimation managing partner Cameron Sherrard said.

“The program was challenging as it included carving out the Laguna El Toqui operations from a large highly customised SAP system, standing up a new tiered landscape with high availability and disaster recovery in the Microsoft Azure Brazilian data centre and without any impact to the users when they logged in on the Monday morning.”