Case study · Mining & Resources
Managing mine designs and their approvals in Jira
Rio Tinto's mine design engineers tracked their work in emails and documents. Interfuze tailored Jira to manage mine designs and approvals in one place, with Jira Plans showing past, current and future workloads.
Outcomes
- One place for each mine design's inputs, reviews and decisions, instead of emails and documents
- Structured mine pit design data, ready for Power BI reporting alongside other company data
The challenge
Rio Tinto runs 17 iron ore mines in the Pilbara. Its mine design engineers create and update the designs for pits, dumps, land bridges and other works at every one of them.
That design work was tracked in emails and documents. Rio Tinto saw room to improve the efficiency, communication and visibility of mine designs, and had identified Jira as a possible tool.
The team needed one place to track and communicate design work, with visibility of work in progress for operations and of planned work for future workload planning.
Our approach
We reviewed the high-level requirements and analysed how the engineers managed mine designs, then proposed a Jira solution that gave the teams one system for designs, workflow, approvals and notifications.
We delivered it in weekly sprints, with a showcase each week, so features arrived quickly and were checked against the business requirements as they went.
The build covered custom issue types and fields to move work out of emails and documents, workflows for the design process and its approvals, Kanban boards showing the status and assignee of each design, automation rules that simplify creating new designs and design versions, and Jira Plans for an overview of each design from start to finish. Training sessions on Jira basics and the new mine design project helped the team adapt quickly and take ownership of the tool.
The outcome
Everything about a mine design is now captured in Jira, which makes it easier to provide inputs, run reviews and trace decisions.
The team can see the status of every design, and Jira Plans shows past, current and future workloads at a glance.
Mine pit design data is now captured in a central, structured form that can be used alongside other company data in reporting tools such as Power BI.
“Interfuze configured a solution in JIRA which met our needs of managing mine design engagements & approvals. Their openness, expert knowledge, professionalism and flexibility made it an absolutely pleasant experience. The end product is a success which the teams have started using daily and it equips us with great data analytics and SharePoint automation abilities.”
Where to next
Related work
The partner
- Atlassian at Interfuze Licensing, Cloud migrations, upgrades, training and support