Richards Bay Minerals boosts strategic financing in R1m Hyperion deal

Issued by Predictive Communications for Intellient
Johannesburg, 13 Feb 2006

Richards Bay Minerals has embarked on a R1 million implementation of the Hyperion Strategic Finance application for its value planning and strategic modelling requirements.

Distributed and supported locally by Intellient, a member of the EOH Group, and implemented in partnership with Equity Value Consulting (EVC), Hyperion Strategic Finance is a financial modelling application. It will provide real-time information on alternative strategies to corporate development, finance and treasury executives at Richard Bay Minerals (RBM), enabling them to analyse the financial impact of critical business decisions and to choose the strategic path of greatest value to deliver continuous performance improvement.

"Once the implementation is complete, RBM will have the ability to quickly and accurately assess the impact of multiple capital projects and strategies on its cash flows and funding requirements," says Steven Hyslop, CEO of EVC. "It will focus the finance team on building and growing its business, and strategise more effectively, instead of building, maintaining and wading through inflexible and unreliable spreadsheets."

Situated on the Indian Ocean coastline of South Africa, Richards Bay Minerals produces titania slag, high purity pig iron, rutile and zircon. Jointly owned by Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton, the company produces 1,9 million tons of product annually, 95% of which is exported.

Prior to beginning the Hyperion Strategic Finance implementation, the company relied on a cumbersome spreadsheet environment to perform any financial planning, modelling and scenario creation.

"Working strategically with financial data in spreadsheets is a risky endeavour at best, because it is too segregated and inflexible, and lacks formulae integrity," says Andre Redgard, business analyst, decision support at RBM.

"Manipulating data takes time and the variety of applications possible with data in spreadsheets is very limiting. The Hyperion Strategic Finance implementation will ensure the easy creation and integration of scenario planning and modelling and improve turnaround times. It will support continuous planning, and will provide much needed drill down capabilities, something we lack in the spreadsheet environment."

Running against the company`s existing Windows XP server infrastructure, Hyperion Strategic Finance will be focused on its capital decision-making, forecasting and budgeting, and strategy formulation areas of activity.

Standard and custom reports

The application generates not only standard reports from the calculated output data but lets users create custom reports. It provides many methods that can be chosen to project values of accounts in forecast periods. Users can select pre-defined forecast methods or enter their own freeform formula for forecasting.

"Using Hyperion Strategic Finance, Richards Bay Minerals will be able to create, test and validate driver-based strategies, budgets and plans; and identify paths of maximum value," says Alwin Swales, operations director at Intellient.

"Richards Bay Minerals will benefit from a better understanding of the impact of different scenarios on its corporate value; funding and financing optimisation; and the optimisation of key accounts."

Intellient

Intellient provides business intelligence (BI) and business performance management (BPM) solutions to midsize and large organisations that require support for their management cycle. Intellient strives to provide solutions that improve organisational growth and profitability for their customers. This is achieved through Hyperion System 9, which includes data analysis and integration services; querying and reporting, performance scorecarding, modelling, budgeting, planning, forecasting, financial consolidation and reporting. Hyperion software is used by more than 10 000 customers globally and by over 60 companies locally. As a member of the EOH (Enterprise Outsourcing Holdings) group of companies, Intellient distributes Hyperion Solutions to the southern African market. Visit www.intellient.co.za for further details.

EVC

EVC is a financial consulting firm that focuses on providing customised financial planning, strategic planning, modelling and valuation capabilities using Hyperion Strategic Finance. With this highly customisable financial modelling tool, EVC eases organisations away from fragmented, silo-type environments that are riddled with errors, low reliability and poor data integrity.

EVC has more than 10 years` field experience across a multitude of industries, with clients that range from Absa Corporate and Merchant Bank, the Industrial Development Corporation of South Africa, Anglo Platinum, the Southern Africa Enterprise Development Fund, Eskom, African Merchant Bank, the SABC, Richards Bay Minerals, and a number of water authorities around the country.

Hyperion

Hyperion Solutions Corporation is the global leader in business performance management software. More than 10 000 customers rely on Hyperion software to provide visibility into how their businesses are performing and to help them plan and model to improve that performance. Using Hyperion software, customers collect data, organise and analyse it, then communicate it across the enterprise. Along with the industry`s most comprehensive and flexible set of interoperable applications, Hyperion offers the leading business intelligence platform optimised to support business performance management solutions. Named one of the Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For (2004), Hyperion serves global customers in 45 countries. A network of more than 600 partners provides the company`s innovative and specialised solutions and services. Hyperion generated revenues of $703 million for the fiscal year that ended 30 June 2005 and is traded under the Nasdaq symbol HYSL. For more information, visit www.hyperion.com.

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