A continuous stream of deals in the past two years has seen global business solutions giant, SAP, take a commanding position as a supplier to the local and international mining industry.
The world's three largest diversified mining groups, BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto and Anglo American - covering the world's major requirements in terms of coal, gold and platinum - hae all moved from proprietary software to SAP generic business and industry-specific solutions.
De Beers, the world's largest supplier of rough diamonds, is an SAP customer.
A range of smaller, commodity-based organisations as diverse as Brazilian iron ore exporter, Samarco, German tinplate producer, Rasselstein, and the world's largest single alumina refinery, Queensland Alumina Limited in Australia, have also made the change to SAP.
In addition, SAP specifically dominates the platinum mining industry, with the world's three largest platinum producers, Anglo Platinum, Impala Platinum and Lonmin Platinum, all implementing enterprise-wide SAP solutions during 2004 and 2005.
In terms of the South Africa mining industry, recent SAP deals include Goldfields, Sasol Mining, Samancor Chrome, Kumba Resources and Xstrata. Barloworld, supplier of equipment and services to the South African industry, has been an SAP customer for more than a decade.
And, more than a third of the organisations using Quadrem - the primary electronic marketplace for the worldwide mining, minerals, metals, oil and gas industries - choose to use SAP's supplier relationship management (SRM) solution to interface with Quadrem's SupplyCenter order management application and, thereby, reach more than 25 000 suppliers worldwide.
SAP Africa's mining, oil and gas solution manager, Dave Cormack, says the mining industry's shift to SAP reflects a sharply increased focus on using information technology (IT) to improve efficiencies and reduce costs in an increasingly competitive marketplace. Global mining companies are standardising their business software platforms on SAP.
"IT efficiencies and costs are in themselves a major issue. The industry is discovering that its traditional proprietary systems inhibit other areas of operations - for all the usual reasons of lack of integration capabilities, lack of ongoing development and diminishing availability of people who know the systems. So a system like SAP, which is pre-integrated, off-the-shelf and offers worldwide support, pretty much sells itself.
"But mining organisations are also realising that SAP solutions don't just solve their IT headaches. Because they incorporate more than 30 years' experience and best practice in the mining industry, they have an inherent ability to address two of the sector's biggest headaches - capital asset productivity and economies of scale.
"To consistently achieve both, speed of financial transactions at the operational level, integration of financial information on the mine site and continuous pro-active management of assets are essential. The mySAP ERP solution enables that by helping to process and interpret operational costs and financial data. And SAP for Mining helps to integrate production planning and execution with financial accounting capability.
"Again, SAP doesn't stop there. We also provide industry-savvy human resources, business warehouse, employee and manager self-service, supplier relationship management, product lifecycle management, supply chain management, maintenance, project management and environmental health and safety functionality - and more besides. If it's a mining or business process, we've got it covered.
"In addition, our NetWeaver integration technology stack means that customers don't have to rip and replace their legacy systems while they acquire our new functionality. And our portal facilities allow organisations to automatically give their employees the information they need according to their roles in the organisation.
"In other words, mining organisations have understood that if they go with SAP, they can't lose."
Tony Craner, information systems superintendent of Queensland Alumina, agrees. "This technology will give us a better picture of our operations. Whether it's maintenance, costs, or people - we're building a system that provides simplified, understandable information that can be accessed at a single point of entry."
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