Options to Beat the Mining Trends

According to a recent study by EY, cash optimization is the number one risk facing mining companies in 2016/2017. Whether looking to release cash from cost reductions, speed up cash conversion rates, or optimize the value from current assets, the ability to generate fast, robust business planning alternatives has become non-negotiable. Options (or planning alternatives) are not only needed for the evaluation of cash preservation strategies. Other drivers for developing alternative planning options are equally important:

• Making portfolio composition and capital allocation decisions require the ability to develop alternatives and simulate their effect on the overall portfolio performance

• Rapid re-planning for operational focus based on internal and external environmental changes

• Developing short-term catch-up plans or event impact simulations

Given these and other reasons, one would expect that mines regularly develop and assess multiple business plans per planning cycle before they select the plan that is most robust against the background scenarios anticipated. However, technical mine planning is a time-consuming and laborious task, and the handover between design and financial costing & budgeting is spreadsheet hell.

The reality is that mines are typically only able to create and assess a single mine plan per annual planning cycle.

This means that despite the possible gains that could be produced from developing multiple scenarios and concomitant plans, the nature of mine planning is prohibitive to the point of negating robust, iterative design, scheduling and financial planning.

Rapid Mine Planning has now become a reality.

MineRP Planner, the revolutionary new planning solution from MineRP, has transformed the planning process and allows integrated technical and financial plans to be created in hours or days, instead of weeks or months. What's more, MineRP and SAP have announced a Co-Innivation Loboratory process to seamlessly integrate technical and financial mine planning, and deliver a truly integrated planning solution. MineRP Planner is built on the MineRP Enterprise Spatial Integration Framework, giving the mine planner immediate access to the latest geology, survey, rock engineering and other relevant datasets required for effective planning.

With MineRP Planner, developing rapid business alternatives at any planning horizon is finally possible.

To read more about MineRP Planner and the work we're doing with SAP, have a look at my blog about the COIL process here.