Khumani Iron Ore Mine has appointed Decision Inc. to assist it with implementing Microsoft SharePoint to replace ageing technology and help the organisation meet its growth demands for the future.
About Khumani Iron Ore Mine
Khumani Iron Ore Mine is situated approximately 30km south of the town of Kathu and approximately 65km north of the town Postmasburg in the Northern Cape province of South Africa.
Khumani Iron Ore Mine replaces the older Beeshoek Iron Ore Mine as the main iron ore producer for Assmang, a company that mines manganese and iron ore. Khumani Mine has the capacity to produce 14 million tons of export quality product.
The iron ore mined at Khumani Iron Ore Mine is exported via the Saldanha Bay Iron Ore Bulk Terminal.
The requirement
The existing back-end system at the Khumani Iron Ore Mine was no longer sufficient due to the extensive expansion of the mine in recent years.
"We required the functionalities that Microsoft SharePoint would bring and needed a system to link across the organisation. Integration with our existing processes would be essential and change management needed to be done effectively for staff to become comfortable with a different way of doing things," says Marizaan Badenhorst at Assmang.
With technology evolving, Khumani started experiencing errors on the old system due to several compatibility issues. Employees were in crisis mode virtually all the time. For example, versioning control on the more than 2 500 documents stored on the system became impractical.
Following a tender process, we identified Decision Inc. as the organisation with the right value proposition and level of support to guide us through the migration process," she says.
The solution
Khumani embarked on a phased approach with Decision Inc. to completely migrate its back-end to the latest version of SharePoint. Despite the level of intricacy, the process went smoothly.
"Decision Inc. identified errors quickly which could be corrected immediately during the migration. SharePoint would provide us with the platform for continued growth we required in a more digitally-rich environment," says Badenhorst.
Badenhorst says Khumani has been very happy with the level of support provided by Decision Inc. throughout the process especially on the change management side.
"Employees never like changing systems especially to one as different to what they were used to as SharePoint. However, Decision Inc. assisted us to really highlight the product and how it would benefit not only the organisation but the daily tasks of our staff."
Additionally, Decision Inc. installed and configured its Document Management Mining Accelerator (DMMA) at the Khumani mine. The turn-key solution was implemented on top of the SharePoint platform and caters for the lifecycle management of critical mining documents such as policies and procedures.
The DMMA, geared specifically towards the mining industry, has benefits that include the easy creation, review and approval of documents, as well as managing user access to sensitive information through the roles and permissions of SharePoint. It also uses the SharePoint taxonomy and metadata tagging capabilities to enable users to find documents easier without the need to search through a physical folder structure.
The result
Badenhorst says the organisation has significantly benefited from the Decision Inc. implementation since it went live a few months ago.
"Not only was the support from Decision Inc. great, but their overall communication with us was excellent. We are now able to more efficiently run our systems and streamline a lot of our processes. Time to response is faster and there is less risk of manual errors," she says.
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