AVEVA supports mining, metals companies to meet increasing demand
Mining and metals companies are working to maximise production and ensure they produce high-quality products with the lowest possible environmental impact and at competitive prices, and industrial software company AVEVA is poised to support them with its technology offering.
This was highlighted by AVEVA Mining, Metals and Minerals global industry principal Glenn Kerkhoff, speaking to Mining Weekly and Engineering News at AVEVA World 2026, held in Milan, Italy, last month.
Kerkhoff, who is working to grow AVEVA’s mining, metals and minerals segment, pointed out that the burgeoning demand for critical minerals needed for the green economy was underpinning much of the segment’s business.
“We are providing the capability to help organisations meet that demand. In order to grow the supply of things like copper, lithium, cobalt and nickel, companies need to have maximum efficiency, as well as to increase production.
“There are new mines starting all the time, and [in areas] where AVEVA is positioned to provide the technology to help customers do that effectively. . . We help customers reduce the time it takes to engineer and design a new facility and bring that operation online, and then once the operation is online, we help customers drive that operation at maximum efficiency.
“[We ensure] we help our customers achieve their goals of meeting the demand for these metals in the future,” Kerkhoff explained.
The high gold price is also contributing strongly to the company’s metals and mining segment.
For example, AVEVA recently undertook work for the world’s largest gold mining company Newmont, assisting them with optimising their operations to reduce costs and energy consumption and mitigate greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions.
Kerkhoff pointed out that reducing energy consumption and reducing reliance on fossil fuels were also major motivators for mining and metals companies.
He mentioned that while mining companies were very advanced in some technologies, such as the use of autonomous machinery, they were still early in the maturity curve on data and digitalisation, lagging behind in collecting data and analysing it to improve operations, with this especially prevalent in midtiers.
However, the industry was changing now, with piquing interest, and with many customers looking to data and digitalisation to drive improvements, he highlighted.
AVEVA stood ready to support companies on this journey, with Kerkhoff highlighting that the company’s offering covered the lifecycle of mining and metals operations, aligned to its strategy of design, build, operate and optimise.
Design and build refers to the upfront engineering work undertaken by a mining or metals company to establish a new operation. As part of operate, AVEVA provides technology to hand the new capability across to operations and get all of the equipment running to nameplate capacity.
In optimise, AVEVA endeavours to help customers maximise productivity and availability, produce high-quality products, minimise GHG emissions and other environmental impacts, and help customers reduce costs, among others.
AVEVA also supports technology across the entire value chain of metals and mining, from extraction through to processing.
Kerkhoff explained that the company collected different parts of the lifecycle and the value chain, transforming it into useful information.
“We contextualise the data, we then harmonise the data and then we start to run analytics of the different data points overall to come up with insights that help improve performance, and improving performance can be applied to any part of the value chain and any part of the lifecycle . . . We’re like a horizontal capability that supports the entire value chain, the entire life cycle.”
AVEVA offers a range of technology products, starting with data systems like supervisory control and data acquisition and Internet of Things, with this information then onboarded onto the company’s data platform for integration.
The next layer has various products, such as production management, predictive analytics and production to help customers understand and improve their performance. This ultimately leads to AVEVA CONNECT.
Launched in 2024, CONNECT is AVEVA’s open, cloud-native industrial intelligence platform, which allows data from assets to be unified, sent to the cloud, analysed and returned with actionable insights.
Kerkhoff also mentioned that the workforce of the future was changing and that there was a need to attract more youth into the mining and metals industry.
He emphasised the importance of AVEVA contributing to this, through technology measures such as automation and tele-remote services, to support a different type of workplace.
Moreover, with the older generation retiring, there is a need to capture their expertise and knowledge, through use of measures like AI to translate this to help the next generation of workers.