This podcast episode is recorded from acQuire's panel discussion live from the tradeshow floor at PDAC 2024. In this discussion, our three industry panelists share their experiences in the mining and resources industry partnering with external data management experts for success. Facilitated by Paul Whelan from acQuire, we are joined by Joe Makori from KamLak, Al Turner from Fortitude Gold and Niti Gupta from ERM.

Welcome to acQuire Connected, the podcast that is your compass in the world of data across environmental, social, and governance.

Welcome back to the second season of the acQuire Connected podcast. The podcast featuring interviews with thought leaders and technology experts who are tackling data management challenges in the geoscientific, environmental and social performance industries and their impacts on the earth's resources, the natural environment, and the communities around them. I'm Jaimee Nobbs, your host for this podcast and today we are featuring the panel discussion from the trade show floor. From this year's Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada, also known as PDAC. We invited three guest speakers to our acquire stage to look at the role of partnering with external data management experts and consultants to support the mining and resources sector, and where acQuire's Nova Network fits. In this panel discussion, you'll hear from Joe Makori, from KamLak, Al Turner from Fortitude Gold and Niti Gupta from ERM, with the panel discussion being facilitated by our very own Paul Whelan. Let's take a listen.

Good afternoon everybody. Yeah, so we're just about to kick off our session this afternoon. It's a panel discussion about the Nova Network and the title is "Partnering for Success with the Nova Network". So the idea of this session really is to introduce you to some people who are engaging and working with the Nova Network, but I guess the whole theme of it is, as we've seen, there's an ever increasing demand for specialised skills and experience in the mining industry, paired with growing ESG obligations and a surge in data management challenges, we've seen a rising need for industry consultants. So we're here today to find out more about the consulting companies, why consulting companies are joining the acQuire Nova Network. And, in this panel discussion, we'll hear from the perspectives of a new Nova Network partner, an experienced Nova Network partner, and a customer of acQuire who's utilising a Nova Network partner.

So we introduce you to our three panellists. Firstly, on your right I've got Joe Makori. So Joe is the co-founder and a database professional at KamLak Inc. So Joe is a business development experience personnel with over 16 years of working in the natural resources industry. As a co-founder at KamLak and his partner here, Thomas is with him, they've dedicated their career to improving the business performance in delivering solutions to complex business problems. He possesses excellent leadership and communication and analytical skills complimented by a bachelor of Commerce Joe's long history of working in and alongside acQuire's business gives him a perspective to really help clients get the most out of their investment in the acQuire solutions. Welcome Joe. Thank you.

Thank you.

So next to Joe is Niti Gupta. Niti is the managing technical consultant at ERM. Niti is a professional geoscientist with a proven track record in delivering comprehensive geological and environmental solutions. She's currently employed at ERM, a multinational consultancy firm. So Niti has recently been exposed to the GIM Suite solutions and her experience helps her excel at optimising data workflows. Her background has spanned many diverse roles and this helps her drive project efficiency and informed decision-making within the industry. Welcome Niti. And I've also got Al, actually the VP of Exploration for Fortitude Gold Corporation. So Al is an avid gold explorer with more than 25 years working as a geologist in many aspects of the profession around the world. He's enjoyed working in Asia, Europe, North and South America, and he's been exposed to a large variety of projects in all stages of development and production. He has the ability to assess situations and lead his team to ensure things get done right. He's currently leading the exploration charge for Fortitude Gold Corp, which owns the Isabella Pearl Mine in Nevada. So welcome.

Alan. Thank you.

So I might kick off with Al and so the first question is what specific challenges in the mining industry has led to the increased demand for industry consultants, do you believe?

I think that's a good point, Paul. So right now we're facing, I would say to get the expertise to build it up in-house is a challenge and once someone starts building it or once a team starts building it to maintain that team is also tough. So from my point of view and through previously working with acQuire in different capacities when I was consulting, it's a lot easier for us to go for well tailored solutions and so that's why basically it's a real advantage to team up and then meet the folks of your Nova Network and kind of not spend that ramp up time. It makes a lot of sense for us.

I guess it helps you get running quicker and faster.

Faster.

Yeah,

Exactly. Time is everything actually, so yeah, thanks.

Well, nextly, Joe and Niti I'll ask you both this question. How is the role of a data manager consultant altered to align with the growing and challenging industry reporting obligations? Because with all the industry reporting requirements, I mean the onus on good data quality, I mean, how have you seen that role fall on the lap of the data management consultant?

So from a consultant's point of view, there is definitely a need to help clients with collection, storing and analysing the data, which eventually leads to the reporting. So having a comprehensive database which can manage these solutions is an integral part of us being consultants for mining industry. Also, we can provide, like Al mentioned, tailored solutions, optimised workflows, and working within the Nova partnership we can get share knowledge best practises to provide these expertise to our clients and also increase our client base as well.

I mean, I can add on that as well, and I see ourselves as consultants being essentially partners using that word accurately as it's defined. We're an extension arm to the companies there. So from our experience, we've seen that I guess these companies or these organisations find that they lack time, a lot of time with the daily operational tasks, the business demands and requirements. So you find that they haven't got time to do things that would allow them to either align with the reporting requirements, the timelines and dedication so they can call up on us, where we can come in and seasonally provide that extra, I guess, set of people where we can drive to collect the data and build a reporting requirements and allow them to meet the targets and be able to keep on moving forward with the operations.

So getting it right quicker. Yeah. Awesome. Thanks.

That's right.

Joe, I'll ask you this question. I mean, obviously you've been within the Nova Network for quite some time, so what attracted you to setting up your consultancy company inside the Nova network and how has it contributed to addressing the challenges in the industry as you just referred to?

Yeah, there's two key things I think that attracted us. The first one is I guess the recognition of the global network partnership. It's a certain set of standards that are globally recognised. If you do mention to anyone who's in the industry, they do understand it and they also understand the level of expectations that they are to get from the Nova Network partnership. So that was one key thing that allowed us, as needed mentioned, it's expanded our market reach. It's expanded our client pool, it's expanded our professional network and that way we're able to connect and collaborate not only in our region, we are Canada based, so we end up having clients all across the world.

Brilliant. And similar for you Niti, how has your company been leveraging acQuire suite of products to enhance your consulting services to stay competitive in this market?

So first thing, having a comprehensive database management solution is a very critical initial step for mining companies to invest into because this leads to resource modelling. I'll talk about geological database management, in this case, resource modelling, estimation reporting, and depending on the company raising money for the company and the projects. So this is a very critical step that sometimes is overlooked. And then as Al mentioned before as well, it takes a lot of time and effort to integrate these processes afterwards. So if you start off on the right foot and we communicate that to our clients and provide these solutions that this can be really helpful for our clients. Also, being a new Nova partner, having support within my organisation, ERM, working with Nova Partners within ERM and then having the support outside ERM with the Nova Network has been tremendous support, has been tremendous positive experience for me. So having that support has helped me to learn this software very fast. Lastly, I would say that being a Nova Network partner enables us to have the most updated information on the software solutions right off the bat, which keeps us ahead on industry trends. So that also adds value to the services we're providing to our clients.

Awesome, thank you. Because you guys are involved in the environmental side of the business as well.

Correct?

Obviously that's an area that we're hoping to build business within this continent as well.

And with sustainability, ERM is one of the biggest firms in the sustainability business in the world. So having those solutions and reaching out to our clients on a global scale in EnviroSys is an area we're looking to expand in.

Excellent. So Alan, I guess what motivated your decision to contract a Nova Network partner, and what value has that partner added to your projects, do you believe?

Basically, I don't mind having a database manager in house, but because of our location, it's actually quite hard to have a dedicated person that's sitting in mine, Nevada working with us also with working with acQuire. Again, I kind of mentioned previously I didn't want to put the training into actually developing that skillset internally, so I wanted to just hire somebody and Alex was a good fit. He had already worked with

Give him a shout out.

Yeah, yeah. No, he did. He's helped us out a lot. So maybe if I could even back up a little bit, the reasoning I wanted to, when I had problems, I came and talked to the choir, was simply the database system is good, but really it was the quality control checks because we have so many data sets coming in and so that's where we're going to probably work very closely with Lexie to maximise some of the acQuire functionality to make our reporting a lot easier so that we can be doing our quality control checks almost real time as it comes back from the lab's going to be our, and that's never happened in our group before. So it's been very manual with Excel, so.

Excellent. Yeah, I presume he's on the curve with the technology, so you can, like we said earlier, get up to speed quicker with implementation.

Exactly. That's very proactive I must say. Thanks.

We'll go back to Joe and Niti. I mean, how has being part of a global network, I think you've already answered that positively impacted the growth and success of your consultant business? I think you sort of did allude to those.

Yes. So again, the support that's within ERM and outside ERM has tremendously helped. Also, knowledge sharing, best practices, sharing that knowledge, and when you're working on diverse projects, right, you're always learning something new. So sharing that within the network or learning from their experience has been pretty invaluable. And also expanding our own client base as well has been pretty amazing.

I think. Joe, you sort of answered that as well.

Yeah, I think I answered that question.

Alright, I'll go back to Al. Given the surge in data management challenges, how has acQuire GIM Suite technology paired with the Nova Network as a role in mitigating the challenges for your representative consulting firm? So I mean, I think the question really alludes to how has it mitigated some of the internal challenges that you've sort of alluded to with regards to engaging in Nova Network partner?

Right. Well, we are still in our infancy at this point. We are still in the process of getting the system rolling. But what I think is because we have, not only do we have lab data coming in of course, but we have four or five, six drills turning at times data sets need to flow in. And I guess my hope is that that integration of using the gin suite and having it all tied together through the different data sets coming in that we can identify, hopefully get a very streamlined flow, but also identify if there's a bust, we can correct it quite quickly and fill it. So that's really, I'd say the integration is probably the part I'm really keen about.

Awesome. Alright, well I really appreciate you guys coming in this afternoon and giving your angle on the Nova Network because the title of Partnering for Success, I guess really the term partnership is really critical because I think ultimately and the network, the concept of being a network as TI and Joe alluded to is we can lean on each other for capability and it is a very global network. We have people based within the Nova Network all over the world. So quite often people do rely on each other's support to actually develop their own business. So thanks very much for your time this afternoon, Joe Makori, Niti Gupta and Al Turner. Thanks very much for coming on.

Thank you. Thank you for having us. Thank you. Thanks for listening to this episode of acQuire Connected. If you enjoyed today's episode and want to keep up today on the latest episodes on tackling your data management challenges, then please hit subscribe. If you want to support the podcast, we'd love for you to like and follow the episode on whichever podcast player you're listening to right now. See you next week on acQuire Connected.

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