‘From Data Silos to Unified Insight.’
How real-time geospatial insight is helping Rio Tinto safeguard people, assets, and the environment worldwide.
Strengthening Global Hazard Management with Maptaskr
Background
Rio Tinto is one of the world’s leading mining and materials companies, operating across more than 35 countries and employing over 50,000 people globally. With major operations in Australia, North America, and Europe, Rio Tinto produces essential materials such as iron ore, aluminium, copper, and critical minerals that power modern industry and the energy transition. The company is recognised not only for its scale but for its commitment to responsible mining, sustainability, and innovation in operational safety and governance.
Within this global organisation, the Major Hazards Surface Mining Centre of Excellence plays a pivotal role in setting and maintaining safety and assurance standards across Rio Tinto’s surface-mining operations. The Centre is responsible for overseeing the management of high-risk infrastructure — including tailings storage facilities (TSFs), dams, and high-voltage installations — and ensuring compliance with the company’s Tailings Policy, which aims for “zero fatalities and elimination of catastrophic failures.”
To support this commitment, the Centre of Excellence sought to modernise its legacy systems with a centralised, geospatially-enabled platform that would deliver real-time visibility, traceability, and spatial context for major hazard assets and activities across global sites.
Challenges: Disconnected Systems and Limited Spatial Insight
Before implementing Power Maps, Rio Tinto’s major-hazard management workflows were distributed across multiple, disconnected systems — each independently managing audits, risk registers, assurance documentation, and compliance reporting. While these tools served their purpose locally, they lacked the integration, spatial context, and scalability needed for global oversight.
As a result, the Major Hazards Centre of Excellence faced challenges in correlating information across regions and assets. Without a single, unified view of hazard zones, control measures, and inspection outcomes, teams had to rely on manual data consolidation and static reports — increasing operational overhead and delaying critical decision-making.
Key challenges included:
Siloed systems and data fragmentation — Safety audits, inspection results, and risk registers were stored in separate applications, limiting the ability to connect cause-and-effect relationships or trace risk trends across sites.
Limited integration with geospatial systems — The absence of real-time mapping and spatial analytics made it difficult to visualise hazard boundaries, correlate risk controls, and assess the potential downstream impacts of asset failure.
Reduced situational awareness during incident response — Without spatial context linking assets, hazards, and controls, teams lacked a comprehensive operational picture to support timely, informed action in critical situations.
These challenges collectively limited Rio Tinto’s ability to achieve its strategic objective: a globally consistent, data-driven approach to major hazard assurance that embeds geospatial intelligence into every stage of the asset lifecycle.
Solution: A Unified Platform for Spatial Governance and Risk Assurance
To address the limitations of disconnected systems and limited spatial insight, Rio Tinto implemented a centralised, geospatially-enabled platform built on Maptaskr Power Maps, fully integrated with Esri ArcGIS. The solution provides a single, authoritative environment for managing major hazard assets, controls, and compliance data — uniting engineering, assurance, and environmental teams around a common operational picture.
At the heart of the platform is Power Maps’ enterprise-grade spatial intelligence, which visualises hazard zones, site layouts, and risk controls in real time. Teams can map every critical asset — from tailings and water storage facilities to high-voltage installations — alongside their associated inspections, maintenance records, and governance documentation. This spatial context enables proactive analysis of risk, faster incident response, and stronger alignment with corporate governance frameworks.
Through its seamless integration with Dynamics 365, Power Maps automates and structures the lifecycle of hazard management — from risk identification and inspection scheduling to assurance reporting and corrective-action tracking.
Key features of the solution include:
Geospatial hazard mapping: Real-time visibility of tailings and high-risk assets across global operations.
Integrated inspection workflows: Automated task creation and tracking within Dynamics 365 for consistent assurance processes.
Centralised risk governance: Linked datasets and reporting tools for data-driven decision-making and proactive hazard management.
Strengthened Global Oversight and Hazard Governance
Maptaskr has transformed how Rio Tinto’s Major Hazards Surface Mining Centre of Excellence manages, monitors, and assures safety across its global surface mining operations. By embedding geospatial intelligence into every stage of hazard management, the company has achieved a step-change in visibility, consistency, and risk control effectiveness.
OUTCOME
As global mining and resources companies look to strengthen operational assurance, Rio Tinto’s success demonstrates how geospatial intelligence and Microsoft Power Platform integration can redefine safety, collaboration, and compliance at scale.
Want to explore how Power Maps can transform your organisation’s approach to risk and spatial governance?