Perigon One was proud to sponsor the October WA Mining Club luncheon at Optus Stadium, and to spend a Friday afternoon with a room full of people who keep WA’s mining industry moving.
It was the club’s last regular luncheon for 2026, and it felt like it. The ballroom was packed, the river was out the window, and Vice President Barry Upton opened with a reminder of how much the club puts back into the industry, from its student camps to the programmes that get young people thinking about a career in mining.
The main event was a fireside chat between John Welborn, Executive Chairman of Fenix Resources, and MC Tim McMillan. Three things he said have stayed with me.
“It’s all about volume and it’s all about infrastructure.” Fenix started with a small mine in the Midwest and a 1.5 million tonne plan. It now produces around 5 million tonnes a year and is working towards 10, and the path there runs through roads, rail sidings, port storage and a private haul road that takes 100 kilometres off every trip.
“It’s all about applying technology.” This was the part I’d have happily listened to for another hour. John can sit in his office and see the whole operation live: the mine, every road train on the 500 kilometre run to Geraldton, the rail siding and the port. He can zoom in on a single truck and see who’s driving, how far into their shift they are and how fatigued they are. There are around 30 dashboards behind it, and it all feeds back to the workshop. When a road washes out or the port closes, the business can adjust because everyone is looking at the same picture.
“Leadership isn’t one person, it’s everyone.” John’s point was that geologists, engineers, finance, logistics and sales all bring different skills, and it only works when they come together under one plan. His close was that mining “is an industry that thrives on partnership”, which is a pretty good summary of why rooms like this one matter.
That’s the value of being there for us. You don’t learn what a mining business is dealing with from a website. You learn it over lunch, at a table of people running sites, fleets and teams, and that afternoon gave us plenty to think about.
If you were at the luncheon, you may have noticed something slightly unusual sitting on your table: a box of Band-Aids.
It was our way of starting a conversation about something every business has. A spreadsheet here. A manual process there. A server that needs a restart every Monday. A recurring IT problem everyone has learned to live with.
Each one was a reasonable fix at the time. That’s what makes them hard to spot. On their own they seem harmless, but over time those temporary fixes become part of the way the business operates, and that’s when they stop being temporary.
Band-Aid solutions don’t scale.
Tim mentioned the boxes from the stage, and more than 50 people took our 2 minute IT Band-Aid Check during and after lunch. Only 30% came back with strong foundations. Most, 64%, found a few Band-Aids showing, and 6% scored in the “time to fix the cause” range.
John’s live view of his operation only works because everything underneath it is connected and talking to each other. For most businesses, the Band-Aids sit exactly where that connection should be:
None of these stop the trucks on their own. Together, they’re the reason a growing business can’t see what’s happening across its own operation.
Technology should support the way your business needs to operate, not force your team to keep working around it.
That’s how we work as an outsourced IT department. Rather than patching the same problem again, we look across your infrastructure, day to day support, cyber security, compliance and automation together, find the cause, and fix it once.
