The latest version of SAP Best Practices for Mining solution incorporates the expertise of industry and partners, to meet current challenges in the sector. Eleanor Reader reports.
SAP Best Practices for Mining provides an ideal springboard for customers in the mining and resources sector, and their partners, to jumpstart their ERP implementation. Originally released in 2000 on 4.6b with the IS-Mine extension, Best Practices for Mining has a long history of joint innovation with the industry resulting in multiple subsequent updates.
In 2012, SAP released its latest version this year, Best Practices for Mining V1.606, which is localised for Australia and built on ECC 6.0 Enhancement Pack 6 (EhP6).
SAP’s solution expert for mining, Matthew Easlea, says this latest update is a showcase of the new functionality they’ve released in EhP6.
“We leveraged the Best Practices concept to show our deep mining industry expertise and to show how to use the standard ERP and IS-Mine add-on solutions to implement mining-specific processes,” he says.
Updating the solution
To ensure the update is specifically targeted to the needs of SAP customers, the mining industry team at SAP called on the knowledge and experience of partners with specific expertise in this area and mining company CIOs. The team regularly meets with a group called the Industry Advisory Council for Mining (IACM), where a select group of mining CIOs shared their requirements and vision with SAP. Mining experts in North America, Australia and China took these requirements and developed new scenarios to directly address the industry’s needs. After this, the SAP team travelled to China to do final development and testing, then progressed to running user acceptance testing with the partners in Brisbane.
The solution
What originated from this detailed process was a fully updated and relevant Best Practices for Mining solution. SAP uses the new NetWeaver Business Client in all 29 of the processes, resulting in a streamlined and attractive user interface to assist with user adoption, according to Easlea.
In the area of maintenance, SAP uses the new Simplified Maintenance Worker User interface, which streamlines the process of creating notifications, work orders and confirmations and dispatches the work to a user’s job list.
“We’ve also embedded TREX into the process to provide Google-like searching capabilities to the maintenance worker,” Easlea adds.
The sales and invoicing process has been updated to use the new Commodity Management solution, which provides end-to-end support for quality based contracts, as well as provisional and differential invoicing.
A new scenario has been developed which shows how to use the new Linear Asset Management functionality in maintenance. The scenario is based around a slurry pipeline and shows how the maintenance plan, work order and confirmation can be made spatially aware, Easlea says.
Finally, SAP has included a scenario based on the new Environment Health and Safety Management (EHSM) 2.0 solution, which replaces the former Environmental Health and Safety (EH&S) solution. This new solution for managing safety incidents and risk assessments features tight integration with the Plant Maintenance module and was developed in conjunction with the mining industry.
Industry input
Partners play a key role in the development and testing of the solution, according to Easlea.
“Their engagement is critical. It is our partners that will be taking the best practices solution, extending it with their own intellectual property and rapidly deploying it to mid-sized mining organisations,” he says.
The partners involved in this update were Windsor Business Solutions, Accenture, Courtland/ASG Group, Wipro, COSOL and Zer01.
Mick Windsor, CEO of Windsor Business Solutions, says that because SAP is so focused on delivering best practices, they work extremely closely with the industry to ensure that their offering meets current requirements.
“The benefits that end clients of SAP will gain from our experience is that we focus specifically on integrated enterprise asset management,” he says.
“Our view is that we’re all about building reliable businesses and we do that by helping organisations improve their productivity, their safety and their sustainability through the superior management of their physical assets.”
Accenture sent an experienced SAP Plant Maintenance consultant to participate in the acceptance testing in Brisbane, gaining insight into the new functionalities in the Mining Solution template, specifically around NetWeaver Business Client for Plant Maintenance, Linear Asset Management functions, and new operational risk management processes, says Accenture Australia SAP lead, Kellie Simpson.
Key trends
Because the solution is focused on the requirements of a typical mining and minerals processing company, trends that shape the present and future of the industry can have a huge impact on solution. One key trend that influenced this latest update is the current price variance of commodity prices.
“Mining companies are focused on the commodity management process, managing the risks associated with commodity prices,” Easlea says.
Another trend is driving simplification and usability. There is currently demand from the mining industry for SAP to handle power, water, slurry, road and rail using a linear asset management approach. Safety also continues to be critical to the Australian mining industry, with Easlea saying only an integrated solution with HR, maintenance and finance can deliver real outcomes.
With solution updates such as this, Windsor believes that business process, rather than technology functionality, must always remain top of mind to ensure mining and resources companies are equipped to meet their objectives.
“The solution is always around the business process, a successful implementation and appropriate training of your people,” he says.
The new release of the Best Practices for Mining solution is now generally available to all SAP customers and partners.
This article was originally published in Inside SAP Summer edition 2012.
