PDFs empowering progress: Burgex Mining Consultants and Adobe Acrobat shaping a sustainable future

2023 was a record-setting year for mineral imports. While not something we think about every day, the U.S. is now more import reliant than ever for the critical minerals needed by our manufacturing, technology, energy, transportation, infrastructure, and defense sectors. Practically, at no time in history has it been more important to explore and develop domestic sources for these precious materials needed for everyday uses like our cell phones, electric vehicles, critical defense systems and much more.

Burgex Mining Consultants is a small but powerful force working to help reduce our reliance on foreign supplies and champion sustainable domestic resource development. Exploration of new resources requires painstaking work that involves analyzing and synthesizing reams of data. For more than a decade, Burgex has been guiding clients through the complexities of the mining industry to unlock the full potential of mineral resource projects. This requires a workforce of 20+ talented and experienced mineral experts and, the PDF, a bedrock of their operation.

No longer buried in paper

With over 5,000 projects a year, Burgex relies on Adobe Acrobat Pro to help them synthesize, organize, and produce a cohesive work product that guides investment decisions. As Crystal Burgess, co-founder and marketing director, explained, “Adobe Acrobat is integrated into the fabric of our business. We’ve been using it for so long, I can’t imagine not using it. In fact, if we did stop using it, it would be a nightmare. We would be buried in paper.”

Every market study, land management package or mining claim exploration requires loads of documents. Burgex researches all the relevant agency reports — numbering in the 50s — compiles them and analyzes them. Their final product is a synthesis of all the intelligence gleaned from this plethora of paper and their years of expertise. Practically, all of this is presented as a market study PDF that can run about 500 pages and guides the client to an investment decision.

When they started, market studies were compiled using other programs that they later converted into a PDF. Given the detail and length of their documents and the frequency with which they needed to produce them, this practice soon proved itself impractical as it didn’t scale with their needs.

Burgess explains, “Just making one small edit would automatically change the formatting throughout the document. It was a huge hassle to sort through and you would consume hours trying to fix it. Acrobat gives us the powerful flexibility to manipulate PDFs for our daily work.”

A flexible solution

Once the document is created, the team moves it to Acrobat for condensing, compiling, managing and editing. Making edits is quick and easy and more importantly, saves them time because one small edit doesn’t affect the overall formatting. This has been a huge time and hassle saver for them.

“Compiling into a clear organized PDF report from the get-go is a huge advantage for us,” Burgess explained. It produces faster changes, fewer versions, and much less back and forth. This gives them more time and bandwidth to focus on adding even more expertise to every work product, increasing the value of their service.

Pervasive PDFs

With rapid company growth — from 2 to 22 employees in 3 years — an expanding portfolio of services and a solid Adobe footprint of applications, Burgex found they needed more control over their solution environment. Adobe had proactively contacted them and proposed a move from individual Acrobat subscriptions to an enterprise license to gain visibility and control.

“It was a no brainer. We gained the overall visibility of where our licenses are, who has them, if they are active and adding people is really easy as well. It has been a real turning point for us,” said Burgess.

Acrobat is woven into the fabric of their business. They use it for time-off requests, which require a date and time-stamped signature, as well as all their sales contracts. Wearing her head-of-marketing hat, Burgess finds Acrobat indispensable as it allows her to exchange and review deliverables such as an infographic, making and receiving comments directly on the collateral. “Before we had things like this in Google docs and comments on the file. We completely lost track of who made what change and it was just hard to even make sense of. Now Acrobat commenting saves us vast amounts of time and headaches,” said Burgess.

With powerful PDF editing, combining, and organizing features as well as integrated e-signing and commenting, Acrobat Pro is part of the bedrock on which Burgex is built. This foundation frees up time and cycles to focus on providing exceptional expertise and clarity for their clients in their quest to foster a more sustainable future that helps advance the synergies between humanity and nature.