Page 21 - Issue 4 2023

ARTICLES FROM OUR Surveillance tech can improve worker

NEWSLETTERS YOU MAY safety in SA’s mines
South Africa’s mining sector is on a journey to transform
HAVE MISSED the country’s mines to guarantee the safety of its workers.

In 2022, the industry reported the lowest-ever number
Twice a week EngineerIT publishes a newsletter. of fatalities, with the largest contribution to its safety
Here are some of the articles that were published performance that year being a 70% decrease in the fall-of-
which you may have missed. ground (FOG) fatalities. On the back of this, during the 2023

Mining Indaba, the Mineral Council South Africa and its
Web3 lacks gender equity members committed efforts to achieve “zero harm”. They
Web3 companies—those developing radical new applications were determined to continue working with labour and the
involving the metaverse, blockchain technologies, and Department of Mineral Resources to develop tangible plans
cryptocurrencies that are set to transform many global industries— to reach this goal.
are on the cutting edge of shaping the future of the digital world. A key component of any mining outfit is for operators to
But in one aspect these companies remain stuck in the past: have adequate oversight of their staff, assets and facilities.
Women are vastly underrepresented among founders and investors. Every small issue has the potential to turn into a giant,
What’s more, that underrepresentation is greater than in science, costly incident. Whether it’s equipment failure, staff injury,
technology, engineering and math (STEM) education and the wider environmental challenges, or criminal activity, operators
tech industry. Only 13% of Web3 founding teams include a woman, must be positioned to see everything happening on their
and only 3% have a team that is exclusively made up of women. sites. Video surveillance allows them to do that. Read more.
These are among the findings of a study being published by BCG
X, the tech build and design unit of Boston Consulting Group (BCG),
and People of Crypto Lab, a creative and innovation studio that aims
to boost diversity, equity and inclusion in the Web3 ecosystem. The
firms partnered to analyse the gender diversity of founders and
investors, using a database from Crunchbase consisting of nearly 2
800 participants. Read more.

EO and LEO satellite services – different
distances from Earth, different
applications on Earth

Low-earth Orbit (LEO) services (such as Starlink, OneWeb and The journey towards digitising the
Amazon’s Project Kuiper) represent the latest development supply chain
in satellite communications technology but are designed
to complement rather than replace existing Geo-stationary The supply chain has been significantly disrupted, with
(GEO) services. Newer does not necessarily equate to better shortages and geopolitical events requiring companies to
for every end user; rather, LEO services will add capacity and think differently about how best to manage their operational
scale to global satellite networks as the use of satellite services environments. This is where digitisation plays a critical role
increases in both current and new user applications. This as it delivers the tools and data required to build agility and
explains why leading satellite connectivity solutions provider resilience into supply chains.
Twoobii now offers both technologies to better meet the needs “Of course, the journey to digitisation is not something
of multiple target audiences. Read more. that happens overnight. Part of the transition is having the
organisational will to make the changes necessary. Whether
that is expanding scenario-planning capabilities, enhancing
manufacturing performance and quality, and improving the
ability to predict demand, the supply chain cannot continue to
operate in the way it has been in the past,” says Antonio Calvo,
senior manager, Global Retail and CPG Practice SAS.
According to the SAS Build supply chain agility through
digitisation e-book, there are four strategies to consider for
companies to inject resilience into their supply chain as they
look to digitise legacy approaches. Read more.

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