|
Ok Tedi is one of the world’s largest mines and contributes 25% of New Guinea’s overseas income. In 1999, BHP, then Australia’s largest mining company, had been looking for a new marketing and finance system for its Ok Tedi copper/gold mine in Papua New Guinea.
The marketing and finance departments are where all of the money is generated by the mine. They had been looking for over four years when they saw MINEMAN and decided that it was exactly what they needed.
It was an important decision.
The marketing people were very talented and had been trained in Germany in the metals marketing business. They had been running the marketing activities at the mine for several years and were a good team. However, they were relying on a vast array of custom-built spreadsheets but the growing volume of the business was making this a very difficult path to continue on. A lot of information had to be transferred from spreadsheet to spreadsheet, and it took up to five days to get an invoice ready for payment.
The finance people were in a similar bind. They had an in-house database which was no longer able to manage the complex marketing contracts emerging from the copper industry. The maintenance of that database was also very labour intensive as all the marketing data had to be transferred from spreadsheets every month.
The first MINEMAN project was to install MINEMAN Marketing. This was implemented in 2000, taking only three months, including the transfer of all the old spreadsheet data, setting up dozens of marketing contracts and a new workflow system. Training and go-live was done in a two week period during August 2000.
The project was a tremendous success and allowed Ok Tedi to generate invoices in less than two days and save a substantial amount of interest on their revenue stream. The system paid for itself in a few months.
The following year MINEMAN Finance was installed and replaced the old database system. This also was a great success, allowing the Finance department to dramatically reduce the time needed to close its’ books, and increase the accuracy of Accounts Receivables and cashflow forecasts.
MINEMAN Marketing and MINEMAN Finance have been running continuously and reliably at Ok Tedi ever since, continually bringing the benefits of improved efficiency, faster processes and deeper analytic capability to its staff and to the operation.
.jpg) | 
