A mining technical software and consulting company that believes it is growing faster than any of its competitors is Deswik, headquartered in Brisbane, Australia, but with very strong links with South Africa. According to Dave Capstick, the company’s Business Development Manager, Deswik has grown rapidly through both the upturns and downturns of mining since being established in 2007 and now has 320 employees based in 14 offices worldwide.
Deswik’s Managing Director, Matthew Chilcott (left), is seen here with Dave Capstick at the company’s South African office.
The company has developed and markets a suite of related software products (Deswik.Suite) that covers the entire mine design and planning process, with the core modules being Deswik.CAD, a fully featured CAD platform, Deswik.Sched, which encompasses both rate and duration-based scheduling, Deswik.MDM, a spatial database which offers powerful mining data management tools, and Deswik.LHS, which delivers landform and haulage solutions. In all, Deswik has 30 modules which all work seamlessly together and which are under constant review and development by the company’s engineers and programmers.
Capstick says that Deswik has gained a strong following from mining companies and mining professionals around the world. “Between them, our customers have around 7 500 licences, which is really an astonishing figure given that Deswik is a relatively young company,” he says. “Our customers include most of the major mining groups, as well as many mid-tier and junior mining companies and consultants. Geographically, we have a presence in most of the world’s mining regions, including Australia, Africa, the Americas, Europe, Russia and Central Asia.”
Deswik’s software is applicable to every type of mine, whether it be underground or on surface, in hard rock or soft, and whatever the commodity. Included in the line-up are modules that address mine surveying, geological mapping, open-pit drill and blast, underground drill and blast, stope optimisation, operations planning and control, coal seam aggregation, and material flow mapping. New modules are added to Deswik.Suite on a regular basis and updates and enhancements to existing modules are continuous.
Capstick notes that a module that is proving popular at the moment, particularly in South Africa, is Deswik.Enviro, which has been developed for mines looking to optimise their rehabilitation and closure outcomes and manage the risks in mining with challenging environmental constraints. It includes a Water Catchment Analysis tool that enables mine owners to perform a catchment analysis over any existing or predicted post-mining surface.
Discussing the reasons for Deswik’s success, Capstick says that the software is based on a deep understanding of how mining really works. “One of our strengths is that we have a very strong consulting arm and, in fact, we have maintained a policy since founding of employing 1,5 consultants for every developer we have on our payroll,” he explains. “These consultants are constantly out in the field using Deswik’s software to advise and assist mining houses and individual mines with specific projects and problems. All the experience they gain is fed back to our developers who use it to ensure that our software remains up to date and relevant to the needs of the market.”
He adds that Deswik’s consultants can undertake a range of tasks for customers, including mine planning, design and scheduling; all types of study and due diligence work; scenario planning; equipment selection and optimisation; and process mapping and improvement. Most commonly, Deswik will provide these services direct to the customer but it also frequently participates in projects in collaboration with other companies – for example, as part of a multi-disciplinary feasibility study team.
Another factor contributing to the success of the company is that its highly experienced founders – Ian Lawler, Adam White and Wayne Romer – remain highly involved in management, with Lawler managing the South African office and White and Romer acting as Technical Directors, both based in Brisbane. All three men worked together earlier in their careers in South Africa and were responsible for developing a software suite known as Mine2-4D, which was highly successful. Ultimately their company ACMS was sold to GijimaAst.
However, Capstick believes the most important factor contributing to the success of Deswik is the company’s focus on providing fanatical customer support. “Deswik prides itself on creating quality software, delivering a great customer experience, and providing measurable value to its customers,” he says. “Deswik places huge value on building lasting relationships with its customers and believes it is known for its responsiveness and dedication to solving customers’ problems.”
Having been a relatively late entrant to the mining technical software field, Deswik from the start has been a proponent of standard protocols for information exchange. Says Capstick: “We needed to be able to incorporate data from the legacy systems our customers were using into our own software, so this feature was a priority when we were developing Deswik.Suite. This is still our philosophy and we are an enthusiastic participant in the Open Mining Format (OMF) interoperability project of the Global Mining Guidelines Group.”
The Group is a network of organisations and companies which, among other things, is dedicated to creating guidelines that respond to common industry challenges. One of the objectives of the OMF interoperability project is developing an open 3D data exchange format to enable complex files to be shared seamlessly between the various mining solutions in the market. Version One of the OMF was released in 2017 and work on Version Two is currently ongoing, with Deswik’s Adam White and Jayne Kato (the latter being Product Manager – Deswik.CAD) both serving on the international working group that is putting it together.
An interesting point about Deswik users is that they form a global community who stay in touch with each other, exchanging information on how to get the best out of the company’s software offerings. Contributing to this sense of community are the regional user conferences which Deswik regularly organises, with one of the latest being held in Fourways, Johannesburg, in October 2019. Modern Mining attended one of the sessions and was impressed by the strong turnout of around 130 attendees, approximately 90 of them being Deswik customers and the balance Deswik’s own in-house experts. The keynote address was delivered by Mzila Mthenjane, President of the Southern African Institute of Mining and Metallurgy (SAIMM).
Finally, it is worth mentioning that Deswik maintains close relationships with academic institutions around the world through ‘Education Partnerships’ which are designed to allow future mining engineers to gain the right software skills to succeed in the mining industry. As part of this partnership, Deswik provides software licences, training material, tutorial videos and on-site workshops. Among the partners are the University of Exeter in the UK, the University of Queensland in Australia, the Colorado School of Mines in the US, the Universidade de Chile in Chile and the University of Mines and Technology (UMaT) in Tarkwa in Ghana.
