Yancoal Seeks to Evolve Their Analytics Capabilities
With the recent wave of digital evolution in the natural resources industries, Australia’s largest pure-play coal producer Yancoal, was looking to maximize new opportunities by expanding their growth strategy. Specifically, the enterprise was aiming to enhance their business agility through advanced analytics and improve the efficiency of their mining operations, particularly in the area of logistics.
What Was Yancoal Looking to Achieve?
The enterprise sought to reduce costs, implement operational efficiencies and shared services, and provide all customers with the certainty of product quality and delivery. In order to achieve these goals, Yancoal was interested in building a strategic data ecosystem to store and analyze operational data in line with the industry best practices. This data ecosystem would support and enhance their current business operations, while simultaneously accommodating newer technologies and business strategies via futureproofing.
The projected business value that Yancoal hoped to actualize included better supply and demand management, reduced fuel consumption, increased energy efficiency and consequently enhance their reputation as one of the few eco-conscious enterprises in the coal industry. In order to strategically implement the appropriate solutions, the company partnered with Trianz’ team of analytics experts.
How the Trianz Approach Upgraded Yancoal’s Analytics Platform
Trianz’ consultants sat down with Yancoal’s leadership to first understand their unique business needs and challenges before collaborating with Amazon Web Services (AWS) on the ideal solution. Through a thorough analysis of the client’s existing data warehouse, Trianz and AWS created migration blueprints that addressed their specific requirements, significantly improving the outcomes of the transformation.
The Trianz subject matter experts created a well-integrated AWS Cloud platform to host the client’s new operational analytics systems. By working with a single vendor, Yancoal was confident that their new platform would be fully supported in the long term, because AWS provides inbuilt updates and integrations.
Enabled new integrations with Yancoal's Environment Health & Safety system (EHS) system and created workloads using AWS Glue, AWS Athena and AWS Transfer family services.
Finally, by engaging Trianz as their managed services partner, Yancoal was able to streamline ongoing operations support to maintain and enhance the capabilities of their analytics platform. This would ensure swift communication and issue resolutions, increasing the availability and resilience of the platform.
Cloud analytics brings disproportionate benefits when it comes to costs and process efficiencies through process automation and improved decision-making. These are outcomes that would not be otherwise realizable without the support of cloud analytics service providers.
Setting up the Operational Analytics Platform on AWS
Yancoal’s analytics platform was built by Trianz on the pillars of AWS’s well-architected framework. The team implemented AWS Transit Gateway, Managed Active Directory and Single Sign-On, deployed infrastructure as code, enabled automation using DevOps including continuous integration and development, and used services like CodeCommit, CodeDeploy, and Terraform for migration.
The Trianz team further applied architecture patterns like serverless and event-based compute, leveraging the AWS Lambda service for event-driven code execution. This enabled near real-time automated data processing and propagation from source to AWS S3 Storage using AWS Glue jobs.
The team also leveraged lean architecture principles for data architecture design, such as data virtualization, by storing data on S3 buckets, and using AWS Athena to perform interactive queries. This eliminated the need for multiple extract-transform-load (ETL) and data movement operations, saving substantial data processing and storage costs.
Trianz implemented application and platform monitoring using AWS CloudWatch. It was used to monitor Glue job status through CloudWatch logs, as well as to oversee infrastructure like EC2 instances for CPU and memory availability and utilization, triggering events to SNS topic in failure scenarios.
The team made use of a market-leading data visualization tool, Tableau, to deliver key performance indicators (KPIs) and metrics through rich visualizations, enabling accurate and timely insights into day-to-day operations.
How Trianz Helped Yancoal Realize Their Business Goals
Yancoal’s engagement with Trianz enabled them to overhaul their data and analytics capabilities by working together to construct a solid operational analytics platform. They were able to achieve their key goal of proactive supply chain management to reduce costs, enhance services, and improve their carbon footprint through increased operational efficiency.
Trianz also delivered significant business impact by implementing automated, real-time, and consistent reporting, as well as standardizing data.
Because Yancoal also engaged Trianz as a managed services partner, the team was also able to deliver key metrics such as 100% data and dashboard availability with no downtime, 100% response and resolution, and significantly increased customer experience.
TCO Analysis Performed
Monitoring of the cloud resources using Concierto.Cloud and CloudWatch automation reduced the manual effort by 20%
Enabled Automation to automatically raise tickets/Incidents in Concierto.Cloud to optimized the SLA breaches and assign to the L2,L3 support teams for resolution.
The Transformational Effects and Impact
Thanks to the high levels of automation that were integrated into Yancoal’s analytics capabilities, the company experienced an annual cost reduction of at least AUD 300,000, a manual effort reduction of at least 50% in report generation, and sharply reduced month-end report durations.
The additional integrations expanded the capabilities of the Operational Analytics platform and provided Yancoal with consistent & trusted insights into their EHS data. This enabled power users on the business teams to create reporting views in Athena which they then leveraged for creating data visualization dashboards for end user consumption.
Finally, Trianz’ implementation of the AWS solution empowered Yancoal to transform into a data-driven enterprise whose robust analytics platform now provides timely, trusted, and actionable insights.
Republished: 2023-07-10
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