Driving the future of digital mining tech

Gillian Tomlinson, Chief Digital and Data Officer at Weir

Sponsored by Cognizant

With two decades of global data and digital transformation expertise, Gillian Tomlinson is

playing a pivotal role in Weir’s transition to delivering innovative mining technology

solutions that accelerate the journey towards smart, efficient and sustainable mining.

The harsh conditions and metaphorical headwinds that challenge the mining industry

demand robust strategies along with multiple platforms and technologies to enable a safer and more sustainable future.

Gillian talked us through the organisation’s strategic vision, the tech leading the

transformation and how Weir is driving a digital-first mindset for the future in a business

that already has a century-and-a-half history.

Gillian Tomlinson, Chief Digital & Data Officer at Weir

A data-rich foundation

Hailing from South Africa and having worked globally before permanently landing in the UK 14 years ago, Gillian has an economics and banking academic background, starting her early career in the credit bureau industry with Dun & Bradstreet supporting Africa and Middle East credit bureau development and implementation.

While there, she worked with the central bank stakeholders and banking institutions to

develop roadmaps to establish the credit bureau and product offerings, facilitate changes to the law and the wider environment, and conditions that would allow for data sharing, and model development for effective credit risk management. Plus, she helped technology teams to develop the tech and data environments accordingly.

Ever since, data has been a strong focus in her career as she moved into leadership roles at companies including Deloitte, RBS and HSBC before securing her first CDO position.

One in 250+

Gillian explains her early entry into the emerging role of Chief Data Officer for the

Whitbread group, which owns Premier Inn, restaurant chains and, at that time, Costa

Coffee, “I believe I was one of only 250 in the world when I joined Whitbread as their first

Chief Data Officer with an end-to-end remit to maximise value of data to enable smart

hotels, smart coffee shops and smart restaurants.”

Since then, she has been back to the financial sector and also worked in telco at Three to

lead the digital and data transformation for enabling 5G, including implementation of the

IoT environment, driving the change to cloud-based architecture, setting up the centre of

excellence for data analytics and data monetisation, and enabling real-time applications

across the board.

Then, in 2021, Gillian joined Weir as their Chief Digital and Data Officer, where she leads

both portfolios from an Enterprise strategy, governance, platform and transformation

perspective across this global business.

As a cross-industry data and digital practitioner, she’s seen that there’s a lot to be learned

from sharing knowledge between different industries. And now she’s bringing her wealth of expertise to Weir, a business with an 150-year history that provides engineering solutions to the mining industry, and that’s always had a seam of innovation running through it.

Mining technology for a sustainable future

As a global engineering organisation serving the mining sector, Weir’s primary product has been supplying industrial heavy equipment, but when Gillian joined, there was intent to evolve the organisation to become a productivity partner that provides smart products and solutions for mining customers.

This demanded a strong focus on digital strategy across the entire company to drive the

transition to becoming a mining technology organisation for a more sustainable future.

Gillian was placed to lead the digital future-back strategy working collaboratively with the Executive team and strategic leaders across the organisation.

Together, they baselined where they saw Weir in five to 10 years, considering everything

from external market changes and internal operations through to how they can develop

smart products for customers with a strong lens on the use of digital technologies, AI and

data to support customers in driving optimised performance across the mine sites.

And of course, Gillian then developed the data strategy that underpins this.

Success in achieving the vision and strategy lies in working collaboratively with the business stakeholders, robust ongoing tracking and management of the digital and data roadmap, and risk management through strong governance. The strategy and roadmap are refreshed annually to maintain focus on value and value tracking, agile delivery, enabling the appropriate cloud based digital and data architecture , and the platforms and products to enable the organisation from an enterprise perspective – including the digital experience platform, integration and automation platform and products, common data platform, analytics toolkit and AI solutions.

Successes so far

Through a strong digital and data enterprise strategy, robust governance and roadmap

management, collaboration and capability delivery has helped Weir to deliver smart

products to customers by enabling sensors across product ranges to provide real-time

streaming of key data that provides highly valuable insight on the performance of that

product. And they’ve also taken it a step further. They’ve enhanced their strategy to

understand more about the data around the operational process that the product operates within, so Weir can support their customers with their biggest sustainability challenges, such as how to use less energy, use water wisely and create less waste, in line with ESG commitments.

Weir continues to accelerate its strategy for sustainable digital mining to support customers who want ‘digital everything, everywhere, all at once’. And continues to build and strengthen its capability through acquisitions, including Motion Metrics (AI and vision

technologies to improve mine safety and energy efficiency) and SentianAI (AI solutions that optimise performance in minerals processing). At the end of February, Weir announced it has agreed to acquire Micromine (intuitive mission-critical digital solutions across the upstream mining value chain from exploration through mine design and planning, operational scheduling and mining operations in hard ore, soft ore and underground applications) – providing advanced integrated digital and technology solutions.

Accelerating Weir’s strategy for sustainable digital mining

Gillian expands on this, “Mining, like most industries, is becoming an incredibly data-rich,

digital-technology-based environment and the performance of your products need to reflect that, so they need to be smart.”

This transformation from vendor to productivity partner has involved not only determining

and building the digital architecture but also delivering change management and a culture shift.

“We've established agile ways of working to enable time to deliver the digital agenda, the

platforms and the products in the right way,” Gillian shares.

This cultural shift is ongoing with a view to augment individual’s expertise through the use

of data, AI and digital technologies. Gillian reassures, “It’s not about removing jobs, it’s

about enhancing roles.”

More on this soon but first let’s talk about the realities of transformation at such a scale.

The challenge of change

With any transformation comes challenges – some foreseen and others resulting from a

rapidly changing business and digital environment.

Gillian shared, “The biggest challenge is the rate and pace at which a company can change vs the willingness to change, it’s a balance as servicing our customers and ensuring operational stability is critical whilst driving the enablement of platform and products and the change needed to tech, data and process architecture to support future ambitions”

Of course, one of these changes is harnessing the power of data and AI.

Driving innovation with AI

With a keen eye for what’s ahead, the company’s AI agenda has seen Weir not only drive

the enablement of AI internally but purchase two AI organisations over the last three years – meaning Weir offers digital/AI solutions alongside their core industrial equipment all of which support the optimisation of a mine’s performance.

The team also recognised early that generative AI was a solution they wanted to enable

within their organisation. Weir’s business leaders identified where value could be unlocked by generative AI, and what the use cases would look like across the various domains from marketing to manufacturing and beyond before developing a return on investment model.

In 2024, they rolled out an enterprise version of Microsoft Copilot across the organisation

and blocked other AI applications to create tighter security. The benefits so far? “Huge

benefits from productivity gains in knowledge management. And 365 is really interesting

because we could develop strategies based on documents that we’ve created over a

number of years.”

Focusing slightly further ahead, Gillian is looking at the possibilities of generative AI to

address health and safety and help drive down total incident rate – an industry standard

indicator that measures lost time and medical treatment injuries per 200,000 hours

worked..

The team also has a strong focus on driving Hyper automation (Intelligent automation)

across the business through the combined and mindful use of automation software, AI

including ML, AI, gen AI, ,UX, Process mining, automated workflows, low code software and integration software, etc.

Gillian explains that from ever-changing regulations to ensuring data quality for digital and AI propositions, working to put the right control framework in place and defining what their architecture needs to look like to embrace generative AI has been and remains a big focus.

Sponsored by Cognizant

A strong framework for governance

Of course, governance and risk management are critical components of any digital

transformation, so how are Gillian and the wider team working to ensure security,

compliance, and ethical AI adoption?

Gillian explains that the strategy they baselined at the beginning gave rise to more robust

digital risk management aligned to the strategy. The team track digital risk appetite and KRIs monthly supported by robust regulatory management governance.

Gillian is focused on continually upskilling herself and mentions she has studied for and

obtained a certification in ethical AI last year. This is something that sits under her remit and she’s also recently hired a Head of Data & AI to support her in working with business stakeholders to enable global compliance.

The challenge now? “We've got really tight governance around AI. Like other organisations we recognise the need to strike the balance to enable innovation in our business while ensuring we’re compliant with changing global AI regulations, adopting a balanced risk approach.”

Mining more metals for the future

Innovation is going to be key in an industry that needs to increase production, fast, and

more sustainably.

Gillian builds on this - The mining and metals industry is embracing ESG-driven business models, which include adopting big data, supply chain automation and AI. Long-term mining projects are focused on the impact on local climate and communities, balancing financial objectives with societal value.

With this in mind, Weir is focused on developing technology solutions for a sustainable

future. Gillian shares, digital technology, data and AI play a key role in this space. Having

transparency and real time data and insights of operations and products’ ESG status is

critical to meeting objectives.

“In addition, we have been working with key mining customers to mature the use of our

digital/AI solutions so that it’s not only useful to drive performance of mining equipment

and operations, but it can also be used to generate key actions to achieve ESG objectives.”

Intelligent platform integration

Gillian also has responsibility for enterprise digital platforms including the digital experience platform, DLS, cloud data and AI platform, data integration platform, digital apps and automation platform and products. We wanted to understand the strategies she has implemented to ensure seamless integration and adoption across business units.

We have adopted a best practice approach recognising that developing and migrating to a cloud based digital architecture that includes the critical applications, digital and data platforms and products is essential to enable the digital and data ecosystem to meet business objectives “

Gillian points out at a detailed level, “We recognised the need to remove point-to-point

integrations between systems and replace them with reusable APIs across the business to enable data interoperability, eliminate duplication and support enabling our target

information architecture and single source of truth.

“This has been very successful in reducing our legacy reliance on data flowing between

point-to-point systems and also in supporting our digital strategy, because we need data

that looks a different way in different forms at different times to enable the intelligent

product lifecycle.”

Changing mindsets

With so much change happening, fostering a digital first mindset has been key for the

business. A crucial part of this has been a top-down definitive drive.

Gillian points out, “It can be a challenge, but you must drive the change management. I

think having communities of practice are important. We have these set up for agile ways of working, data analytics, AI and more – we've got quite an extensive range.

“I think those are critical to educating areas across the business on our literally new ways of working, the application of new standards, protocols and solutions. They’ve been

invaluable, and they still prove to be invaluable.”

She notes that many of Weir’s people are interested in new tech and want to be part of the change. And while people are experts in their role, the company has also run a digital fitness programme to help increase data literacy and support employees to gain a deeper understanding of the digital propositions the company now offers. This is also helping those in client-facing roles to support customers with getting the correct technology for their needs.

Putting a team and partners in place

To this existing team of motivated individuals and leaders, Gillian has also built out her own team with new hires, including through bringing in former coworkers from other sectors she’s previously worked in.

For Gillian, what’s important is not necessarily their background in terms of sector, but their expertise in understanding digital and data solutions and how to drive them out across organisations. And the characteristics she considers crucial within the team are people who are change agents and who have a thirst for knowledge.

But at a time when there’s a shortage of talent globally, selecting the right partners has also been crucial as an add-on to both the knowledge within the business and capacity it has. Gillian explains, “We have domain expertise internally, and we’ve got very strong bases – such as Bengaluru in India – which we've been building out.

“But we also flex with a small number of partners globally that bring digital data skills to the table which augment our existing teams with burst capacity resource.”

These partners are not just supporting the team but are also providing new business

opportunities. Gillian states, “Partners are critical to our journey. Their clients are also our

clients, so it's not just a vendor relationship, but rather there could potentially be go-to-

market opportunities as well.”

The next phase

Clearly, the digital and data transformation journey is well underway. We wondered what

steps are next for Weir? Gillian fills us in on the three key areas of future focus.

“We've established a number of community practices, which we are scaling out across our business. Driving digital and data fitness is a strong focus to ensure our workforce are

equipped and empowered to further support our customers as we enhance our digital

product offerings.

Scaling our cloud platform and products whilst maintaining an eye on emerging

technologies is key.

Hyper automation is another area of focus for Weir and, in their case, enabling the

automation of business and IT products through maximising the value of the application of digital and data solutions such as UX, RPA, automated workflow software, digital apps,

machine learning, integration platform services, AI including generative AI and more.

This approach supports the development of smart factories, for example.

Gillian also adds, “The other very interesting area is the roadmap for AI, quantum

computing and quantum AI. The ability for that to solve really big, complex problems in the mining industry is an area to watch.”

A last thought

When we asked Gillian for one last thought to leave our readers with, she remarks on the

disruption in the market, changing business models and the information highways opening up.

“If you look at the new ERP systems they’re completely different propositions to what have come before – these are cloud-based data AI solutions.

“So, I think the landscape in terms of data and analytics, digital practitioners, people

resource, how you partner, is fundamentally changing. It's going to be very interesting to

see how these roles morph, because I think there's a lot more lens on innovation.”

Gillian was speaking with Digital Edge, Senior Content Writer - Caroline Hardy