In today’s world, the mining industry must achieve multiple goals, such as increased production, improved efficiency, and cost containment, while also addressing sustainability concerns by aiming for global competitiveness. However, they are currently confronted with several negative global trends, such as falling commodity prices, a slowing global economy, and skilled labour shortages. Thus, they are focusing on four different strategic priorities to transform their organisation into an intelligent enterprise with skilled labour.

Strategic Priorities for Mining Industries

The importance and values of Digital Transformation have been recognised by mining industries. Thus, they are concentrating on four strategic priorities outlined below to transform their organization into an intelligent enterprise.

• Make the business more predictable, agile, and productive through Automation
• Collaborate with customers, suppliers, and workers
• Focus on customer needs
• Mine responsibly and sustainably

To achieve this, Intelligent technologies embedded in RISE with SAP framework act as a key-value contributor in enabling the mining industries to become intelligent enterprises. Adapting to this enables your organization to redesign the entire business models, processes, and products by driving enterprise digitalization through product development.

Collaborate with customers, suppliers, and workers

Building “Digital Twins”, a virtual representation of a physical object or system, allows the mining company to transform their operations and supply chain into a responsive network. In the olden days, they were running in silos with little collaboration, resulting in uncoordinated decisions. Bringing the different internal and external parties together to collaborate and have real-time insights on the same data set will make mining more responsive and efficient. Also providing additional services to customers through collaboration will enhance the customer experience.

Let us consider a real-time scenario to better understand this example. There are two companies namely “ABC Technologies and XYZ Technologies” who are working towards achieving a goal within a given period.

In the case of ABC Technologies, they have disconnected departments and limited access to business networks which makes responsive planning impossible. They had some difficulties sharing information with their stakeholders because the plans were not created consistently and shared within the departments. Also, their maintenance and operations were not coordinated which led to wastage of time and money. Businesses that rely on a small number of external partners and communicate with them manually have limited visibility, complex collaboration, unavoidable delays, and a considerable risk of error.

In the case of XYZ Technologies, they use Industry 4.0 technology for mining, which connects all their operations and supply chain networks internally. A simultaneous collaboration of all relevant stakeholders enabled them to transition from linear supply chains to digital supply networks using this system. Also, they were able to gain visibility, agility, and responsiveness with a single plan, which they shared with all their partners and stakeholders. It also provided information about future maintenance and procurement needs, as well as inventory optimization.

To summarise, ABC Technologies had disconnected departments and limited access to the business network, forcing them to perform manual work with many errors. XYZ Technologies, on the other hand, could react quickly to any sudden change in the network because they were all linked together. Aligning procurement, sales, production, and delivery also helped them to improve customer satisfaction.

Now you may be asking, “How can RISE with SAP helps us?” Here are the primary business capabilities they offer to assist you in reaching your objectives:

• To increase the profitability of your business by transforming interactions with all stakeholders into an interactive, collaborative, and responsive network.
• To rethink capital portfolio and project management, as well as to collaborate with all stakeholders to ensure efficient project management.
• The integration of the “Ariba Network” aids in the optimization, efficiency, and speed of supplier collaboration.
• It is simple to monitor and analyse maintenance workload.

Top Value Drivers

The major value drivers in the mining industries post successful deployment of SAP S/4HANA are:

• Audit cost reduction by 10%-20%
• Increase in scope of budgeted projects by 10%-15%

(Note: Data was taken from SAP’s statistics)

Conclusion

To summarise, SAP S/4HANA can improve your business values with hundreds of new features and seamless functionality. Many mining engineers have taken advantage of the benefits of process mining with key SAP processes such as order-to-cash, procure-to-pay, and record-to-report.

Own your tomorrow with a guided journey and outcome-driven practices of RISE with SAP. To know more about how SAP S/4HANA or about other solutions that can help enterprises in mining companies, do contact us!