Teck: case study 

Teck And Their Digital Needs

Teck is one of Canada’s leading mining companies, focused on providing products essential to building a better quality of life for people around the globe. Teck is also the parent company of Neptune Terminals, a significant exporter of Canadian natural resources, namely potash from Saskatchewan and steelmaking coal from the western provinces and has over 50 years in the supply chain industry. Neptune can handle over 23.5 million tons of bulk products a year.

Teck Sought to Digitally Streamline Systems and Business Processes with Power BI

Teck has been operating safely and responsibly as a leader among mining companies, with operations and projects in Canada, the United States, Chile, and Peru.

The company is on a journey to transition to digital solutions that support its emerging business processes. Neptune Terminals manages all the export and transportation processes for Teck and Canpotex, one of the world’s largest potash exporters.

The technology leadership sought ways to digitally streamline Neptune Terminals’ systems and associated business processes to increase overall efficiency and reduce costs.

Primary Issues with Teck They Wanted to Resolve

The company’s legacy system took too long and didn’t enable its employees to work efficiently.

Business analysts processed everything manually using Excel files and other internal applications. They were looking for a solution to help them see the whole data in one chart.

Running analyses was tedious, with reports being processed daily, weekly, and monthly.

Improved Operational Proficiencies with Microsoft Power BI

While Excel sheets gave them many advantages, they had their own bottlenecks. Our team’s first step was to run an analysis and understand their existing system and ongoing requirements.

• To maximize visibility on the operations side, they wanted an interactive dashboard that could pull up four different types of reports: daily, weekly, and monthly.
• We proposed an operational analytics dashboard to improve operational process efficiencies by leveraging Microsoft Power BI.

Our team analyzed the customer’s needs and designed the architecture of the BI solution that would allow the integration of disparate data sources and transform them into actionable reports.

What We Planned to Achieve with Power BI for Teck

• Extracting the latest version of data and processing it was a little complex.
• Since they were using Excel sheets and an internal application to track the latest data version, it took much work for the team to meet the gaps in the report.
• Our team took on the additional responsibility of running queries, getting the latest data version, and finally meeting the report’s gaps.
• For operations managers to conduct near real-time analytics, we used the Power BI Desktop application.

Calculations were made on the baseline and delivered four different types of reports to cater to the following needs:

• Safety and incidence report
• Hourly net dumping report
• Ship loading report in kilotons
• Maintenance report

What We Achieved for Teck’s Data Governance

• The reports gave the Customer better visibility in the operational process, especially while loading and unloading the vessels.
• The dashboards were improving overall efficiency.
• The customer got an overview of costs and used this information for budgeting and reducing expenses.
• Users could view their KPIs over different periods – daily, weekly, and monthly against the baseline and drill deeper into the reports to identify the efficiencies and inefficiencies.
• Incident reporting helped them take the necessary safety measures and create a safer working environment.
• With Power BI, data governance became effortless.
• Data analysis and collaboration across departments were seamless without worrying about version control.

Key Performance Indicator Metrics

12600

Employee Strength in 2023

4.13%

Employee Count Increase from previous year