An activity as extractive as the mining industry, and requiring significant assets for production, is prone to demand technology to achieve efficiency, ensure operational safety, cut environmental impacts, or, in short, ensure sustainability.
And indeed, their demand for technological tools to achieve their goals leads to the selection of providers with different objectives, scopes, timelines, and, above all, resources.
Developers define technical debt as a set of decisions made during the development of technological tools that affect the quality of the final product, non-functional requirements such as a) code quality issues related to complexity, duplication, or lack of documentation, b) architecture issues such as the inability or complexity of integrating between components or modules, lack of them, or the use of obsolete versions, and c) quality control issues, deployments, or the absence of automated controls.
The origin is an excessive focus on the functional requirements of tech products in their development. These constraints include limited time for market positioning, unclear scopes, and a lack of knowledge.
But the mining industry acquires technological capabilities through providers, in small processes, large processes, or throughout the value chain, so that when selecting its provider, it acquires all or part of this technical debt and incorporates it into its processes.
This gives rise to many hidden problems, some of which are of minor significance, related to the instability of solutions that generate high demand or incur excessive maintenance costs, which approach the limits of service level agreements; challenges in scaling or integrating with other systems in the environment such as ERPs or others; and gaps or potential security vulnerabilities that need attention. Below, we show some of the most significant problems:
a. High support and maintenance demands can hurt service quality. They may push the provider to its economic limit.
b. High-security vulnerabilities from poor practices, outdated technology, or code gaps.
c. High dependency on the provider, which, in the event of a discontinuity of any component or element of the technological tool, can compromise even the continuity of the mining process it serves.
d. Inability or excessive complexity in scaling the tool as production goals increase.
e. Inability or excessive complexity in integrating with other solutions in the mining ecosystem.
f. Inability or excessive complexity for necessary customizations in the dynamics of mining operations.
g. Incompatibility for future updates of the environment, whether by other types of machinery, protocols, complementary technological tools such as TPMS, asset managers, or others.
Selection processes describe non-functional requirements with limited detail, as functionalities dominate in the operational environment to address the primary efficiency needs of mining processes in the short term.
Many strategies exist for managing technical debt. They emphasize different factors, depending on the industry. In the case of the mining industry, there are some that we share below.
