Case Study: Enabling Connected, Autonomous Mining Operations at Thiess
Thiess Mining Services partnered with insightfactory.ai to modernise its data foundation and support the rollout of the new autonomous mining operation.
By deploying a the Insight Factory Lakehouse platform, Thiess gained continuous reporting, production-grade reliability, and a centralised capability that could scale across its global network of mine sites.
insightfactory.ai is purpose-built to help organisations accelerate large-scale data programs with speed and confidence. This use case is a clear example of how we can rapidly deploy a global, enterprise-grade data and AI platform across development, test, and production environments, mobilising quickly to ingest massive volumes of data and engineer meaningful outcomes.
Through the combination of our platform, our people, and our support services, we enabled Thiess to advance its data program at a critical moment. By standing up the Insight Factory at pace, we provided the foundation required to support connected, autonomous mining operations while giving the organisation the agility to scale innovation across its global footprint.
The Problem
Thiess, a global mining services provider, operates a geographically dispersed network of mine sites, each with varying levels of digital maturity. Across this network, the organisation faced limited visibility and fragmented reporting, with data ingestion mechanisms that were inconsistent and often siloed. This made it difficult to generate enterprise-wide insights or establish a unified view of operations. At the same time, Thiess required a platform that could deliver high-reliability support to match the demands of its 24/7 operations.
A new strategic priority sharpened this need: enabling a data and reporting capability for the autonomous-enabled Olive Downs mine. Standing up a scalable, centralised platform that could ingest and process vast streams of autonomous operational data was critical not just for Olive Downs, but for establishing a backbone capable of supporting a connected data program across Thiess’s broader operations. Without such a foundation, the organisation risked fragmented growth, limited scalability, and a missed opportunity to leverage data as a strategic asset across its global footprint.
The Solution: The Insight Factory
Under constrained delivery timelines, insightfactory.ai deployed the Insight Factory platform directly into Thiess’s cloud tenant, creating a secure and scalable foundation for enterprise-wide data management. The solution established data pipelines across a range of mine sites, centralising information into a single Insight Factory Lakehouse platform that unified operations and centralised data. A critical component was the integration and ingestion of autonomous data from the Olive Downs site, ensuring Thiess could capture and process the vast data streams required to support its autonomous mining program.
Alongside this, the platform was designed with production-grade reliability, providing robust workload execution to meet the demands of 24/7 operations. insightfactory.ai delivered production support on critical workloads while simultaneously enabling Thiess engineers to onboard to the platform, equipping them to independently build and extend solutions. The result was a balance of stability and enablement: a platform that could reliably power day-to-day operations while giving Thiess the capability to innovate and scale across its global network of mines.
The Value Delivered
The Insight Factory platform now serves as a centralised, enterprise-wide data hub for Thiess. At Olive Downs, it provided the critical data infrastructure required to enable the required reporting, while simultaneously creating a backbone that connected mine sites across the globe through a single, unified hub. This connectivity allowed dispersed operations to be integrated into a consistent framework, delivering continuous reporting at scale with low-latency insights that supported faster and more informed decision-making.
The platform also introduced production-grade reliability, with managed support ensuring consistent uptime and resilient performance across Thiess’s 24/7 operations. Just as importantly, it empowered Thiess engineers to build, deploy, and run solutions directly within the platform, accelerating innovation and embedding capability across the business. Together, these outcomes highlight how insightfactory.ai enables mission-critical data transformation in mining, providing the scalability, reliability, and connectivity needed to power autonomous operations today and support future growth across the organisation.
