Good data management and a single source of truth can aid juniors in so many ways

Any exploration project, regardless of the size of the company, will need to create a showcase to present to investors. Good data management will be crucial to this. Without it, you cannot effectively and efficiently combine the new and historical data that will make your case.

How can you organise all this data, with different sources, formats, shapes, and sizes? How can you make it available for all the interested parties through the whole process of acquisition, generation of discussion and decision making? How can you record the history of the data in an auditable, traceable, organised way and be efficient with your time? And just as importantly for a junior mining partner, how can you help those you share it with be efficient with their own time so you can make the best decisions together?

Data is an asset for any company, but what’s particularly relevant for junior mining exploration is its ability to drive fast, dynamic decision making, at every phase of the process, and deliver compelling results to your investors – ideally ahead of the competition.

Having a multidisciplinary team, potentially scattered across geographies, only makes this more complex. But when your data is well organised (and only when it’s well organised), you can bring together all these different teams, sources and data to work as one, and make rapid accurate decisions while saving time and money.

So our advice would be: don’t just gather your data; centralise it.

Centralising your data in a well-managed, single source of truth will…

• Enable your teams to collaborate better.
• Make data more easily accessible and traceable throughout the whole exploration process.
• Make it simpler to share efficiently with third parties.
• Securely back it up so there’s less risk this business-critical information will be lost.

Imagine you have all the technical and logistical conditions to make a new discovery, and the results come in to indicate that you’ve been successful. But while you invested in the technology to gather the data, you didn’t invest in the technology to manage it from a single, central point. Now you can’t share that data with your team. It takes at least 20 minutes to find the right information within a jumble of project data folders. Then it takes hours just to send the geophysical data to your specialist… And the delays continue.

Are your people working on your data, or working for it?

It’s one of the many reasons we developed our Seequent Central solution to resolve data management, sharing and visualisation issues. Particularly relevant for juniors are its abilities to share a complete project with your team collaboratively, publish a new model or notification whenever a change is made, track and back up all versions, store any type of data and share views of your model with third parties via web visualisation through a simple browsers; no need for your partners to have the Central software themselves.

Exploration is complex, challenging and not getting any easier. Consolidating and rationalising your data with a solution such as Seequent Central, at least gives your team the freedom to spend their time as scientists, rather than data wranglers, and at best lets you quickly test and retain theories without being locked into them, so you can make the most of your exploration and develop multiple deposits.

To support juniors in their discovery ambitions – and ensure their data is a boost rather than a burden – we’ve collected the thoughts of Seequent’s geological discovery experts to create our “Six Steps to Better Exploration for Juniors” eBook.

You can access it for free here, and look out for more ideas and insight on junior minor exploration in future blogs on this site.