Mining is a tough business, and that’s long before you even head down into the hole. Firstly, there’s a maze of compliance to negotiate, which if done wrong, will result in the roof coming down on your head. Figuratively, at this stage, and call it a minefield if you must. With at least some of this compliance done the old-fashioned way, the also old-fashioned problems of manual paper-based processes are never far from the coal face.
A new digital platform to address the ‘old way’ of compliance
After a rule change further tightened compliance requirements over in the mines of Western Australia, I was prompted to look at how we could start to address this challenge. So came the creation of a digital platform called Credential Data App (CDA). This app allows workers to upload licences, medical clearances, and training records directly into their company’s SAP system, with AI quietly ensuring every detail is accurate and compliant.
The old process was a nightmare for HR. Workers would email PDFs, fax forms, or hand deliver documents. It took days, sometimes weeks, and errors were inevitable while people sat on the bench instead of being on duty. We cut that workload by 80% almost overnight with the use of CDA.
Choosing the happy path, not the perfect path
While the immediate outcome of neat, AI-powered automation is awesome for the company concerned, a couple of broader lessons emerged, which may well prove handy for anyone looking to send paperwork to the shadow realm. Where it should, of course, belong. We didn’t try to build an automation that could handle every possible exception from day one. That’s where most projects go wrong. You could end up with an insanely complex application that’s brittle, expensive to maintain, and turns out to be slower than doing things manually.
When automating any process, I learnt it was best to focus on ‘the happy path’. The happy path is the straightforward process that works exactly as it should nearly all of the time. It just works, with self-service in this case by the worker, with the system verifying everything. But exceptions are inevitable, particularly when any sort of human is involved as a ‘user’. They often come up with the most fantastic and unexpected ways of interacting with even the most foolproof of systems and processes.
In these inevitable ‘unhappy paths’, the logic is as simple as it is profound: instead of coding for it, simply boot it out of the automated process, and give it straight to the human in the loop. People are incredibly good at handling exceptions, while automations tend to fall over fast. When something is off, it kicks out instantly to a human operator with clear context about what went wrong. The operator fixes the ‘oddity’, maybe a misspelled name or an expired certification.
Human-centred design is your friend
Another lesson learnt along the way, is that automation doesn’t end there, because neither does the process. There may be multiple additional steps before completion, and once the immediate problem causing the exception is resolved, it gets expensive if the rest of the process remains with the human operator.
The answer? The human can resume the process right where they left off, with no starting over and no lost data, and a consistent outcome. There’s a bit of design philosophy behind this elegant solution, though. Human-centred design means we automate the boring, repetitive stuff so humans can do what they’re actually good at: judgment, empathy, and problem solving.
We built CDA using human-centred design to celebrate the happy path and gracefully hand off the exceptions. That’s what makes it reliable at scale. We didn’t aim for perfection. We aimed for something that simply works beautifully, most of the time.
