At Ex Mente, we are our teams. Our Digital Team consists of a focused group of computer and electronic engineers dedicated to researching and developing high-performance tools. These tools include simulators, calculators, and process modelling applications. Through the Technology at your fingertips series, we want to showcase some of the work that our Digital Team is currently doing. In our first article, From rust to iron, we will explore the technical decisions that form the foundation of our Digital Team’s work.

At Ex Mente, we believe that the quality of a solution is linked to the quality of the tools that you use to build the solution. To consistently deliver excellence to our clients in the pyrometallurgical industry, it is critical for us to use the right tools.

The core of our work for our partners is productivity: To solve a complex process challenge as effectively and efficiently as possible. Our primary goal is productivity, to make sure that our engineers can be focused to solve problems effectively and efficiently. When a client approaches us with a complex process challenge, our energy must go into solving that challenge, not wrestling with our computers.
This is why we choose our tools with great care to empower our colleagues and our clients.

It starts with stable foundations
A good technology stack starts with a stable foundation that does not present a challenge to users. Our digital engineering environments need to support the other experts in Ex Mente to be able to focus entirely on solving metallurgical and process problems. To accomplish this, our Digital Team uses a low-level language like Rust. Rust allows us to build software libraries that are high-performing, while also being safe. Using it, the team creates reusable building blocks that capture our modelling knowledge in high-performance libraries, so that we do not have to reinvent the wheel for every new project. We build it once, maintain it properly, and reuse it with confidence.

It is about empowerment
The purpose of our Digital Team is to support Ex Mente’s wider team of metallurgical, chemical and process engineers to use these building blocks in a language they are comfortable with. That is why we create Python wrappers for our core Rust tools. This empowers the rest of our Ex Mente teams to leverage the power of our low-level libraries without having to learn a complex programming language, keeping them focused on providing solutions to our clients’ challenges.

Finally, our software tools can only help our clients if they are accessible and easy to use. We use modern web technologies to create user-friendly interfaces that allow our clients to interact with our tools without needing to understand the technical details behind them. This empowers our clients to find the balance between user experience and performance.

What is next?
After laying the foundation by choosing tools that offer stability, speed, and usability, how does it look to transform these raw technical choices into practical utilities that our teams can use to add value for our clients?

In our next article, From iron to steel, we will discuss how our Digital Team transforms these technical building blocks into specialised tools for the rest of the Ex Mente team.