For over 115 years, Dickinson Group of Companies (DGC) has delivered industrial excellence across Sub-Saharan Africa.
Today, through its DGC AFRICA operations, the company is addressing one of the most pressing strategic challenges facing mining and industrial organisations: maintaining, managing, and future-proofing high-value industrial assets under increasingly demanding and unpredictable conditions.
With a growing regional footprint, headquartered in Kitwe, Zambia, DGC AFRICA delivers strategic, performance-driven services that strengthen plant reliability, accelerate engineering innovation, and enable workforce transformation.
The company’s recent launch of its AI-powered reliability platform, DGC SmartAsset Intelligence, marks a significant advancement in how asset integrity is achieved, introducing advanced reliability tools, digital readiness, and operational resilience to the African industrial sector.
ADDRESSING OPERATIONAL COMPLEXITY IN HARSH INDUSTRIAL ENVIRONMENTS
Mining operations across Sub-Saharan Africa contend with some of the harshest industrial conditions globally. Extreme temperatures, abrasive materials, corrosive processing environments, and regional power instability significantly strain critical fixed infrastructure, including smelters, mills, furnaces, crushers, and conveying systems.
This pressure is compounded by ageing assets, complex maintenance ecosystems, and supply chain challenges, resulting in costly unplanned outages, reduced asset life, and mounting total cost of ownership.
DGC AFRICA's asset integrity framework is engineered to address these realities directly. Through a comprehensive suite of services, from structural reliability engineering and risk-based inspections to shutdown execution, refurbishment, and digital diagnostics, the company is helping clients mitigate failure risk, extend operational life, and stabilise performance under pressure.
DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION IN ASSET INTEGRITY: FROM REACTIVE TO PREDICTIVE
Many mining and processing plants still operate within reactive or time-based maintenance frameworks that struggle to meet today’s production demands and risk profiles.
DGC SmartAsset Intelligence changes this paradigm by embedding AI-powered intelligence directly into plant reliability workflows to enable continuous monitoring of asset condition using live plant data.
This advanced digital capability has become a central pillar in the company’s integrated asset management strategy. The platform delivers:
Real-time condition monitoring through sensor-integrated systems and SCADA connectivity
Anomaly detection and failure pattern recognition using machine learning to identify risks before they escalate
Predictive maintenance prioritisation, optimising resource deployment and asset intervention timelines
CMMS integration, ensuring seamless data-driven planning and execution
For mining companies under pressure to improve uptime, control costs, and meet ESG targets, this shift toward predictive maintenance is not only advantageous — it is strategically essential.
FULL-SCOPE RELIABILITY: DGC AFRICA’S INTEGRATED ASSET INTEGRITY MODEL
DGC AFRICA's offering is structured to deliver scalable, high-impact reliability strategies that adapt to the operational realities of each client:
Assessment and Benchmarking
Every engagement begins with a comprehensive diagnostic of maintenance maturity, asset condition, and operational constraints to establish a baseline understanding of operational challenges. This informs a tailored roadmap toward reliability excellence.
Digital Enablement and Condition Monitoring
Iot-enabled sensors, thermography, and vibration analysis tools capture real-time asset data, feeding into CMMS platforms for streamlined planning and execution.
Shutdown and Maintenance Execution
From structural refurbishments and mechanical overhauls to refractory services and instrumentation calibration, DGC delivers safe, efficient shutdowns aligned with production timelines.
Engineering Innovation and Retrofit Solutions
Where ageing infrastructure threatens performance, DGC applies 3D scanning, reverse engineering, and component redesign to restore functionality and reduce CAPEX exposure.
Continuous Optimisation and Strategic Advisory
Clients receive failure mode analyses, strategic insights, and performance tracking post-execution, enabling data-informed decision-making and continuous improvement.
What sets the DGC SmartAsset Intelligence platform apart is its scalability and practical application in African industrial settings.
The company aligns every digital deployment to a client’s existing operational level of maturity, infrastructure and data readiness, consequently ensuring that digital transformation results in tangible business outcomes.
REGIONAL REACH, LOCAL EXECUTION: WHY DGC DELIVERS BETTER OUTCOMES
DGC AFRICA operates with a unique combination of global standards and local delivery models. With established operations in Zambia and expansion plans across Sub-Saharan Africa, the company delivers tangible advantages for regional clients:
Rapid mobilisation of multidisciplinary, site-ready teams
Contextual understanding of regional industrial conditions and regulatory environments
Longstanding stakeholder relationships with regulatory authorities, community leaders, and local suppliers
Extensive knowledge of site layouts, historical challenges, and plant-specific requirements
This embedded model ensures that every solution is technically sound, logistically feasible, and aligned with local execution realities.
BUILDING A SAFER, SMARTER, MORE SUSTAINABLE INDUSTRIAL FUTURE
As Sub-Saharan Africa’s mining and industrial sectors move toward digital maturity, DGC AFRICA enables that transition, helping clients build more innovative, safer, and more sustainable operations.
The rollout of SmartAsset Intelligence represents a defining milestone: the arrival of AI-enabled reliability in a format that is scalable, accessible, and engineered for the realities of African industry.
To further elevate this offering, DGC AFRICA is establishing a strategic partnership with Falkonry, a global leader in time series AI for industrial operations. Falkonry’s solutions are designed to uncover hidden insights within vast operational datasets, enabling faster, evidence-based decision-making by plant engineers, process specialists, and maintenance teams. Their technology empowers users to overcome data overload, root cause complexity, and workflow integration, critical issues for mining operations operating under high variability and production pressure.
By integrating Falkonry’s AI capabilities into DGC’s SmartAsset Intelligence platform, clients will benefit from enhanced predictive accuracy, deeper anomaly detection, and a more intuitive user experience that supports uptime, quality, and operational agility.
This collaboration marks a new chapter in digital reliability, not just introducing advanced AI tools but embedding them into everyday operational workflows in a way that scales across plants, regions, and asset classes.
For operational leaders seeking to reduce downtime, unlock long-term value, and future-proof their assets, DGC provides more than a service.
The company offers:
• A strategic partner invested in local outcomes
• A roadmap to performance through proven frameworks
• A vision of resilience, backed by technology, talent, and trust
In today’s mining environment, reliability is not a maintenance function, it’s a strategic differentiator. And DGC AFRICA is redefining what’s possible, one operation at a time.
Published May 3, 2025