Fourth Industrial Revolution in the Vanadium Mining and Mineral Extraction Operations in South Africa

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is a global phenomenon affecting all spheres of operations and all organisations. The South African vanadium mining and minerals extraction operations are included in this. The objective of this research was to understand work done on 4IR technologies for feasible future operations in SA's vanadium sector so as to find out any necessary conditions or factors that contribute to the decision to adopt 4IR technologies. A secondary objective was to determine any correlations among the factors and organisational targets. These have been met by following an exploratory stance using both qualitative and quantitative methods to find and analyse the data gathered. The main findings were that the factors affecting vanadium mining activities in SA are technical feasibility, cost of automation, benefits of automation and regulation requirements. Seven levels of automation have been used to assess the current levels of automation. A framework has been proposed and used to investigate the factors that contribute to the decisions for automation in the vanadium industry in South Africa.