My consulting work is done through my fully registered and insured consulting company: MISOM Consulting Services. Please email me for more details on rates and availability.

Consulting is both expected and encouraged for professors as a way of keeping-up with current issues in industry, increasing the profile of the university, and for personal growth. My areas of expertise and past experience with customers (INCO Limited, Teck Cominco, Phelps Dodge Corporation, Peabody Energy, assorted technology vendors) are primarily:

• Business process audits
• Technology planning, justification, implementation, maintenance, and audits.
• Enterprise error identification & correction systems
• IT and the tools that use data to develop information that leads to knowledge and consequently action
• Simulation
• Data and process modeling (need before undertaking any hardware/software implementation or workflow changes)
• Data Warehousing project management: build, training, & implementation
• SQL / database utilization and cleanup
• Designing data source output
• Developing data accuracy and reliability systems
• Design and implementation of data-driven KPI and performance management systems including drill-downs and web-delivery (managed project and provided conceptual input, not the actual web-code)
• Undertook industrial ethnography (cultural study to identify motivation leverage measures for organization change)
• developed data-driven live-linked activity based costing systems and automated budgeting tools
• Mine to mill (M2M) data warehouse design and analysis tools
• Justification of advanced technology within capital expenditure requests
  
• Predictive maintenance data model design and measures development
  Workflow redesign to accommodate new data-driven technologies.
  
• Business process improvement, tactical - strategic within the mining operation.
  

As seen in the diagram below, integrating the complex technology of the future, will involve considering three areas with vastly different technical and knowledge backgrounds: 1) technical hardware/software, 2) business culture and workflow, and 3) the mineral production system. These changes are by no means easy to achieve, however, in Real Options terms, it is a growth option, meaning, well-worth the effort with many secondary benefits and potential.

Figure: Complexity of integrating complex IT-based technology of the future

More specifically, the following are some areas that have also seen success and past business.

• Application of Business Systems: effectiveness of using the business systems in place are largely dependent on the IT infrastructure and process workflow at your operation. Expertise in areas such as developing Activity Based Costing systems, and tactical manager control measures such as Six Sigma and Balanced Score Cards is available.
• Technology & Information Audit: what is the current state of your software, technology, and data infrastructure and how effective are you at using what you already have? What do you need to keep pace with competitors?
• Information Technology Utilization Solutions: there are many modern uses of data and software systems that can increase productivity without capital investment. Solutions can be provided. These would include data mining solutions.
• IT Implementation: effectiveness of the IT you are about to implement or invest should be part of a larger plan of what you will be using the systems for.
• Justification techniques for advanced technology: how to justify new investments in automation, Information Technology, and new business systems. This incorporates techniques such as real options and the Analytical Hierarchy process as well as traditional tools
• Development of simulation models: simulation models for mining equipment, data generation and mine emulation are already created greatly reducing simulation model development time. Simulation would be made practical and applicable by using the real data from the mining system itself.