Client Agility through Improved Service Delivery

One of the published 2015 strategic initiatives of MineRP is to improve client responsiveness and agility through enhanced service delivery.

Why?

MineRP has a multitude of blue-chip mining clients globally, who trust MineRP’s products and service offerings to plan, measure, control and report the exploration and mining business. The business of mining is getting more complex, driven by a constant squeeze on margins resulting from falling commodity prices, year on year increases in the cost-base and higher expectations from shareholders, communities and governments. Mines are not only expecting better features on the software it buys, but also suppliers who offer agile service delivery, and understand the multifaceted chain of parties involved to improve their competitiveness in a volatile mining world.

Forbes and others have published extensively on ways to improve client agility. Some of the published solutions and ways that really struck home with MineRP are:

Improving Client Insight as a driver to design product and services offerings. Understanding the client from every angle; and understanding the impact of offered products and services on the client, and managing it;
Improving the speed of decision making;
Training of staff to have a deep awareness of client issues;
Constantly producing incremental improvements;
Providing Technology “self-help”, like Frequently Asked Questions and online Forums; and
Improving internal culture for service delivery, like getting rid of fear by building self-awareness of how the client is experiencing our services.

MineRP is taking on most of the above principles to improve Service Delivery to our clients, and planning next phases on the others. The initiative touches everyone in the company.

Culture. Firstly, to improve our internal culture and become more self-aware, all employees in MineRP are involved. Several initiatives to improve culture, from changing structures to ease conflicting internal demands, to a “Vibe!” programme were launched.
Deep Client Insight. Our Global Sales departments include Sales Managers, Account Executives and Pre-Sales Solution consultants; all of who are our eyes and ears of building deep insight into the spoken and unspoken needs of our clients. Direct client feedback is extremely important to MineRP, and we use a variety of channels including video interviews, monthly executive sessions, and presentations used at strategic sessions to obtain external views on how we do, and where we should improve.
Rethinking Products and Landscapes. Next, our Strategic Value Creation- and Product Management teams constantly re-invent the features of our software solutions. A big part of our current thinking is spent on strategies to refresh our client’s Mine Technical Systems (MTS) solution landscape using the spatial integration solutions from MineRP to Amalgamate and Relate data from the multitude of solution providers in the MTS space. Furthermore, we do regular client sessions to show progress with new products, and demonstrate how combining our solutions with partners like IBM and SAP can change the way mines to business.
Solution Landscape Commercials and Contracts. Refreshing the solution landscape for clients requires new solution roadmaps. MineRP offers strategic architecture workshops to assist clients to think through a five-year approach to refreshing their MTS environments. New thinking about a “licence equivalency” model ensures clients can move to new products over time, and get credit for the current products they are licensed for, with several innovative commercial solutions to use the software, including financing options, and Software-as-as-Service (SaaS) and cloud-based solutions.
Education and Learning. MineRP is investing in training and education on a few levels. Firstly, as new solutions are developed, we regularly invest in internal training of our implementation-, support and maintenance teams globally – focussing on the problems our solutions solve for clients, and how the solutions work,. Secondly, MineRP realised 3 years ago that the mining industry has critical issues with its skilled workforce retention. High turnover skilled software users, and the constantly dwindling budgets available to keep training new- and current employees, add to this problem. To help our clients with this global reality, we are investing in e-learning technologies, and will soon launch an e-learning platform where distance learning, blended learning, and certification of partners on the MineRP product-set will be possible. With this offering, learning is delivered from a cloud-based solution, into a blended learning classroom, or to a learner even at home, with flexible ordering and payment options! With a global top-50 mining company recently partnering with us for a blended e-learning platform to train mine planners, surveyors, rock engineers, safety managers, geologists, ventilation engineers on the MineRP solutions set, we are eager to see the impact this new value proposition will have on the user experience of our solutions.
Service Management Processes. MineRP has made a considerable investment in its ability to measure, control and report on the mechanisms employed to service its software and services globally. A COBIT and ITIL-based approach was followed to define the global processes and capabilities for Software Assurance and Service Support. This included the definition and implementation of standardised processes for Incident-, Problem-, Change, Release and Deployment, Request fulfilment, Configuration management, and Knowledge management. These customer-facing processes are supported by Product Management, Software Development and Maintenance, Quality Assurance, Data Management and other processes.
Systems Management, Improvements & Reporting. In order to keep our promise of excellent service to our clients, MineRP has done away with fragmented regional support functions, and implemented a global ITIL-based systems management solution, supported by a single agile software development team. Continuous improvement is ensured through global KPI’s for service delivery and tracked both globally and at regional levels, with customer specific service level reporting available and reviewed with enrolled customers on a weekly or monthly basis.

We believe we are on the right track and have a practical approach to improving service delivery. We have made great improvements, and are starting to get good client feedback as result. Having said that – we’d love to hear from you if you feel we can improve!

Jéan Roux, COO MineRP.