A spark of inspiration in an everyday interaction can sometimes result in huge savings, Mining Engineer Luke Victor says.
Luke, who returned to his native Australia this year after working in Europe for three years, believes his role as a Technical Solution Specialist can make a difference in lots of areas.
‘I like it that my technical expertise has a positive impact across many traditionally separate fields, internally and with customers,’ Luke says.
‘You never quite know when a routine email or conversation might lead into a big project, and save a customer millions of dollars they may have otherwise missed.’
He rates writing the BlastLogic Tablet online training course as his biggest achievement since joining Maptek.
‘It came with a series of challenges in setting up a usable dataset which can be made available to clients in addition to the usual boiling-down of concepts, ordering ideas in a meaningful sequence and carefully planning word-by-word and click-by-click what instructors would say and do.
‘Interestingly, the space that I work in now is largely in the open pit design, optimisation and scheduling rather than drill and blast conformance.
'I've been working with our Open Pit Mine Planning steering committee to help push important improvements for our clients, running a lot of engineering training courses in optimisation and design, plus consulting and demonstrating our software in client datasets.'
Attracted to the industry partly through the sheer scale of mining operations, Luke has noticed a change in mindset during his career to date.
‘There aren’t too many industries where you can talk in terms of millions of tonnes of product and not be laughed out of the room.
‘Even in my relatively short time in the industry, I’ve noticed a really big shift towards treating mining as a single process and developing workflows to manage start-to-finish, rather than individual silos with a product for each silo.
‘I look forward to seeing our products fully integrated, where they can run on the same dataset, live at the same time - it will be a huge milestone for our users.’
Working for Maptek has given him a chance to travel to parts of the world he otherwise wouldn’t have had a chance to visit and he finds it fulfilling to assist clients from different cultures and countries.