Background
A leading South African diversified mining and minerals company, African Rainbow Minerals (ARM), now has a single source of truth for its total IT spend across the organisation.
Following the implementation of MagicOrange’s end-to-end IT financial management (ITFM) solution, ARM has benefited from the reduced effort required to run a monthly report cycle, including forecasting. This allowed their team to gain visibility into nine years’ worth of budget information within the first two weeks of the project, which enabled them to collate all the data into an analytics view.
Using MagicOrange, ARM can now break down those nine years and compare monthly actuals to the budget figure, whereas previously, they had to work with totals only.
Challenge
ARM has interests in a wide variety of mines, including platinum, platinum group metals, iron, coal, copper and gold. Having a wide range of mining operations and IT costs, which are split between corporate managed expenses (services being used across the business) and operationally managed expenses (IT costs managed by individual mines themselves), contributed to the challenge of understanding what the total spend is across ARM, despite the fundamental division between centrally and operationally managed costs.
As a result of the division, there was no single centralised general ledger (GL) that could be used to identify corporate and operation expenses in one place. The current GL provided limited information to support ARM with its IT financial management, such as streamlining the process of doing monthly bills.
“Most of the data has always been available and visible to ARM, but this was housed in various files that were not accessible by all,” notes Tian van der Walt, Customer Success Senior Manager at MagicOrange.
The data that ARM had access to was also stored in an unstructured and unpresentable format before using MagicOrange, which inhibited CFOs from speaking a common language with executives.
Solution
ARM needed an ITFM solution to enhance the capturing process for the GL to streamline the monthly billing process and gain transparency into the individual costs of each mining operation. The solution also needed to improve communication between the different mines as they gain a greater understanding of how costs are attributed to each operation. MagicOrange was selected as the tool of choice to drive transparency and simplicity into the organisation’s IT cost allocation process. A user-friendly MagicOrange & Microsoft Productivity integration was used as the automation and transformation middle layer to provide ARM with a solution that will help the company to plan the organisation’s future and improve business operations.
Benefits
African Rainbow Minerals has experienced numerous benefits following MagicOrange’s strategy, planning and implementation.
- The entire GL is now automated resulting in a transparent, defendable GL that can support the organisation in financial decision-making.
- Cost transparency enabled ARM to reduce the manual effort required for running a monthly cycle of budgeting and forecasting because it no longer needed to split each invoice per mine, but rather centralise and process them all concurrently through MagicOrange.
- Another benefit realised by ARM was the improved relations and visibility between mine sites and IT, due to greater transparency into their spend and fairer cost allocation to the relevant sites.
ARM can now make strategic decisions on future business plans and easily run ‘what if’ scenarios if something needs changing. Furthermore, the ITFM implementation allows ARM to future-proof and modernise business operations away from legacy workflow systems. The ease of use of MagicOrange also enable ARM to get all of this information into an analytics view in a short space of time, giving the company the ability and the tools to do a trend analysis across the entire organisation. The information is now presented by a market leading tool that leverages an embedded instance of Microsoft’s Power BI, delivering market-leading analytics to information consumers. Self-service analytics are also available to all users, ensuring that they can present the information in a format that makes sense to them and their function.
Conclusion
“Following successful implementations of our cost transparency solution into a number of sectors, including financial services, insurance, retail, FMCG and industrial, this was our second foray into the mining sector and we hope to expand on capabilities and expertise gained through this implementation in all future projects in this vertical,” says Van der Walt.
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