AusIMM-aligned study phase modelling made easy

DiiMOS ModellingTechno Economic Analysis

13 June

Written By Bec G

Get from Scoping to Green Light faster with our easy-to-use, secure decision-support tool.

Understanding the study phase minefield.

From determining what the maximum value of a mineralised deposit could be through to getting investors onboard, it can be a minefield of assumptions, complex calculations, and countless what-ifs.

It’s also slow. The average discovery-to-production time is 15.7 years, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence1 and the study phase alone is 7-10 years of that. It’s a long time to manage and maintain a collection of disparate modelling spreadsheets. How many different analysts and study managers will own that collection over its lifetime? How often will it stand up to questions from the board and scrutiny from investors?

And yet it’s that model that’s the link between you and the investment community that determines your project’s success or failure.

As the Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy (AusIMM) states:

The minerals industry has a bad history of decisions being underpinned by faulty economic evaluation modelling. These have ranged from minor mine-site decisions to major corporate acquisitions. Too often the modelling was convoluted, ‘sophisticated’ and personalised, so audit was tedious and frustrating. Consequently, people at all levels have called for ‘simple’ evaluation models.

This was the background to the AusIMM’s “Guidelines for Technical Economic Evaluation of Minerals Industry Projects”.2

The guidelines are the result of several years’ work by a specialist committee of experts to establish a set of best practices for creating and operating evaluation models. Their intention is to make models that are easy to understand whether you’re a new analyst drafted in to replace the creator, an investor’s auditor performing due diligence, or you’re simply coming back to the twentieth iteration of a model you’ve been working on for years.

The Guidelines are a gold standard for model design ensuring your project is credible, transparent, and worthy of investment. Understanding and adhering to them should
be non-negotiable.

The guidelines centre on six key principles for building and running a techno-economic model:

The only problem is that the guide is a DIY for a spreadsheet but frankly who has time for that? Moreover, you are still left with a spreadsheet and therefore all the suspicions that comes with it!

In response idoba’s built its Techno Economic Analysis model for Scoping and Feasibility Studies that meets these principles and more.

It delivers a familiar AusIMM Guideline look-and-feel (for instant investor credibility) but is backed by the power of DiiMOS™ Modelling, so you can immediately model and analyse hundreds of scenarios across your project’s value landscape.

Using DiiMOS™ Modelling with its Quick Start Template for Scoping and Feasibility Studies, along with your project data, gives you an easy to follow, transparent, rigorous and auditable techno-economic model that enables you to easily evaluate your options, focus your domain experts and more quickly get in front of prospective investors with a credible, transparent and defendable pitch.

From our own mine study experience, we realised that establishing a deposit’s potential viability was the root cause of most study phase frustration and delay.
To address this, DiiMOS Modelling enables users to analyse a full range of development futures that not only validates their belief in the project’s potential viability in line with JORC definitions, but also facilitates convergence on the most compelling value proposition to pitch and even share interactively with potential investors.
We believe DiiMOS Modelling’s interactive template, with rapid scenario analysis to find a project’s optimum value and explore natural variation in alignment with AusIMM’s guidelines, is the missing link in the study phase process.”
- Matthew Schneider, CTO, idoba

Here’s why you need DiiMOS™ Modelling for Scoping and Feasibility Studies.

DiiMOS™ Modelling offers an intuitive, AusIMM-aligned, plain English visual driver interface that’s as easy to use as a spreadsheet but much, much more powerful.

For finding your project optimums and collaborating with experts and investors, DiiMOS™ Modelling is your answer.

With its inherent auditability and logic lock-down features, it carries more credible than a home-made spreadsheet model, no matter how closely you say you’ve followed the guidelines.

Dodging the Study Phase Catch-22

Too many mining projects get stuck at an early stage.

Determining that they have an economically viable mineral resource is a critical stage in attracting investment, but junior explorers and mine developers often lack the resources internally to prove this viability and persuade investors. They rely on external experts and get drawn into an expensive loop of reworking the scoping stage to try and find the magic formula that makes the deposit work.

The result is a catch-22 where the project can’t proceed without investment and can’t win investment without spending more on external experts.

DiiMOS™ Modelling seeks to break this loop with its simple two-step approach.

Discovering possible futures

Working from a definition of the mineralised zone and some practical, user-nominated, input ranges, DiiMOS™ Modelling generates the project’s “value landscape”.

This is displayed as a simple but powerful graphic that shows both the magnitude and nature of the project’s value across a large range of practical scenarios.

Users select the range of scenarios from this value landscape that they believe is most attractive to investors and DiiMOS™ Modelling then provides the schedule of input values (costs, timings, etc) that need to be true in order to deliver success.

From there, project owners can quickly focus their domain experts to identify the pathway(s) required to inform and support the best defendable investor pitch - and in the shortest possible time.

Hundreds of scenarios in an instant

Quantum levels beyond the minimal standard sensitivity analysis, DiiMOS™ modelling comes with the ability to factorially flex the key variables to three levels, generating the full suite of possible scenarios in less than 10 minutes and displays them all in graphical value landscape that instantly tells the project’s value story.

More than that, DiiMOS™ Modelling calculates the interplay and cross-dependencies between variables. For example, capital cost is usually linked to both recovery and plant availability. As such “Value Engineering” can inadvertently reduce the percentage mineral recovery and increase downtime. Moreover, relaxing the project’s annualised capacity (nameplate) can have a counterintuitively beneficial effect on a project’s financial metrics. In short, the impact of any one change on the bottom line is not always obvious.

When the entire project depends on the quality of this analysis, the conventional approach of assuming inputs are independent of each other feels inadequate. As a study owner there is nothing you want less than leaving a high-value scenario on the table, especially one that is obvious in hindsight.

Communicate your thinking

Whether sharing direct access to the model or circulating PDF snapshot reports, idoba’s DiiMOS™ Modelling is a powerful communication tool. Its insightful graphics, familiar interface, intuitive and transparent design, and auditability makes it simple to share your thinking, assumptions, and plans.

Secure collaboration and sharing for better insights and greater credibility

Because DiiMOS™ Modelling is a secure, cloud-based app, you can share and collaborate between experts wherever they are located. More minds mean getting to a better result, faster.

And, once you get in front of investors, you can securely share your AusIMM-aligned model with them, too. They can work through your model and see your assumptions and calculations and overlay their own market projections. This approach differentiates you from the competition and gives your pitch maximum credibility and a simpler due diligence audit.

How DiiMOS™ Modelling meets AusIMM’s key principles.

Easy to follow

AusIMM states that “a person unfamiliar with the business should be able to receive the evaluation model remotely and be able to readily understand and follow the evaluation from beginning to end.”

That means having an obvious and logical flow, with consistent heading and use of colour etc. It requires an intuitive architecture and layout with neither black box nor black holes where calculations occur, or figures appear.

DiiMOS™ Modelling achieves all of this through its transparent design, plain English descriptions, and inbuilt search capability. DiiMOS™ Modelling is designed to remove the uncertainties of bespoke spreadsheets so it can be used and understood by the full spectrum of stakeholders.

Tailored-to-purpose

In line with the AusIMM Guidelines, DiiMOS™ Modelling Techno Economic Analysis model for Scoping and Feasibility Studies is not over-engineered or too large for its job. idoba’s Quick Start Template has been built by study phase experts with many years’ experience in the mining industry.

It is designed for ease of input and ease of interpretation, so no-mismatched units, scale factors or timescales. Everything is consistent and as a mining analyst would expect to find.

DiiMOS™ Modelling uses simple and transparent logic and plain English, with clear distinctions between user inputs and calculated fields. Calculations are obvious and logical, and, naturally, we avoid industry jargon and ambiguous abbreviations.

Critically, for a model destined to go through many iterations over a prolonged time, model date and version are always obvious to the user.

Disciplined, rigorous and consistent

Inconsistent formatting, formulas, and layouts, along with hidden rows and black-box assumptions are the bane of every Excel user.

DiiMOS™ Modelling eliminates those “Oh no!!” moments with designed-in discipline and rigorous attention to consistency.

As you would expect, it includes a robust and auditable change history and enables version control for smoother collaboration and easier due diligence.

Recording sources of all data

DiiMOS™ Modelling’s model data is centrally managed and controlled. Each scenario maintains its own data (inputs and outputs) whilst using the same model calculations, assumptions, and any centrally managed model level data.

Rapid to audit

Whether internal audit or investor due diligence, idoba’s DiiMOS™ Modelling template is designed to make the job easier. Here is how:

Familiar AusIMM standard, identifiable from the AusIMM guidelines
Transparent design and calculations built by idoba to remove the uncertainties of bespoke spreadsheets
Plain English driver and calculation descriptions with inbuilt linking and search capability
Ability to provide separate access for an auditor to perform their own analysis and save scenarios of interest for sharing

DiiMOS™ Modelling for Scoping and Feasibility Studies: your diamond in the dark.

idoba’s DiiMOS™ Modelling arms you with a powerful, AusIMM-aligned model that shows potential investors you’re not just digging around in the dark. It helps them see the sparkle in your project.

With DiiMOS™ Modelling you are not just choosing a tool; you are choosing a future where your decisions are faster, smarter, and in line with the best standards in the industry. It is time to take your projects from scoping to green light with confidence and ease.