TechConnect overhauls data management for Idemitsu Australia

The resources company is moving toward near real-time insights after early wins in query performance and automated reporting.

TechConnect has delivered the first phase of a multi-year data transformation program for Idemitsu Australia, the local arm of Japan’s Idemitsu Kosan.

Data management is key to Idemitsu’s productivity, efficiency and sustainability efforts in its coal mines operations, including its Boggabri coal mine in New South Wales.

However, an internal review found cost and efficiency issues due to siloed and fragmented production data, high licensing fees, limited support for legacy systems, incompatibility and increased risk across systems.

The business turned to TechConnect and the result is a modernised data management platform as part of a multi-year delivery that has already improved data visibility and decision-making capabilities.

TechConnect director, Clint Thomson, said the collaboration is helping Idemitsu “improve the way they understand and apply data to business strategy”.

Scaling reporting and analytics

Consolidating data into a single pane of view has reduced licensing costs, simplified governance and maintenance and improved the scalability of reporting across management and regulatory needs.

“TechConnect replaced fragmented legacy systems with a single, cloud-based analytics platform powered by Databricks and AWS,” said Thomson.

The platform automates key management and regulatory reports — comparing production, utilisation and performance against targets, and undertaking compliance checks like actual output versus license allowances.

Report creation can now be scaled using data from across the operation in a single analytics platform, where it’s cleansed, validated and transformed.

“This means every report draws from the same consistent source of truth — making it faster and easier to generate new reports at scale without duplicating effort or risking inconsistencies,” Thomson told CRN.

Mission-critical queries that once failed or took weeks can now be executed in seconds. For instance, reports can now track material from a specific seam or location in the mine to a particular processing plant.

This enables Idemitsu to link extraction activities with processing performance — unlocking insights into yield, quality and the true effectiveness of different areas of the pit over time.

“The platform efficiently handles highly detailed queries that weren’t previously possible,” said Thomson.

The next phase will expand to enterprise-wide rollouts and capabilities to ingest near real-time operational data, support AI-driven predictive analytics and enable natural language functionality.

“Users could simply ask questions of their data and explore predictive insights like spotting trends or issues earlier, enabling smarter, faster decision-making in mining operations,” said Thomson.