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.

Mine responsibly and sustainably

Mining companies are increasingly under pressure to meet public, investor and government demands for environmental, safety and governance criteria. Companies are looking for ways to reduce waste, increase circularity and employ socially responsible business practices across material lifecycles and value chains. The main issue in business is making sustainability profitable and profitability sustainable. Thus, Mining companies can begin by automating and making more accessible environmental data collection.

Let us consider a real-world scenario to better understand this example. Two persons namely Ashna and Esha are working for the same company and must report to their managers and present a presentation to them.

Ashna must manually collect raw data for the previous reporting period, but she soon discovers that the operations department only aggregates and calculates asset results using spreadsheets. And the most important way for these data to be shared for source verification, data quality validations, and approvals is only via email. She then manually creates final reports using the spreadsheets maintained by the operations department and presents them to respective stakeholders.

Esha, on the other hand, tries to collect data with the help of the operations department, which monitors and updates real-time data in intelligent software. It also keeps track of all maintenance, legal and industry standards, as well as audit results. She then determines what she needs to collect the data and approaches the appropriate people for assistance because they have an automated workflow with clearly defined roles and responsibilities. Finally, she produces a final report and distributes it to external and internal stakeholders.

To summarise, Ashna had to use a variety of applications to efficiently manage the procurement process, and she was at considerable risk of entering correct data because she was doing it manually and could not optimise it later. Esha, on the other hand, found that automated intelligent software with machine learning helped her curate proper real-time data while also saving her a lot of time.

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 gain complete visibility into operational issues and improve worker and environmental safety with real-time insights.
• To make procurement a smooth and frictionless process.
• Ad-hoc analytic reports and dashboards are embedded in the SAP Environment, Health, and Safety Management application which is found helpful for mining companies.

Top Value Drivers

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

• Planning cycles are shorter and faster
• Increased agility in management change
• Provided Real-time insights
• Risk of non-compliance was reduced
• Increased revenue, expansion, and brand value
• Transparency and trust have improved.

(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!