Ramesys helps industrial minerals client to scale with confidence

Our client is an ASX listed mining company that produces industrial grade heavy minerals.

Scaling their operations to meet the growing demand in global markets, the company’s management was looking for ways of reducing risk and increasing profitability. This involved a move away from Excel spreadsheets to a standardised process that integrated all aspects of the business.

Ramping up quickly, the company needed to be able to have clear visibility into performance in order to respond in a timely manner with revised plans when things changed.

Challenge

Starting with an extensive suite of spreadsheets that they used to take them through feasibility and construction, the client needed to make the choice whether to persist with Excel or look for a better option. Time was of the essence, as they had a 3-month window in which they could access people to put the solution in place before production ramped up.

The requirements were:

• A financial planning solution that would enable the business analysts across the organisation to easily build budgets based on the mine plan and to quickly turn around forecasts. 
• A simple reporting system that allowed users and management to quickly see issues and opportunities and empower strong collaboration across the business units on forecasts.
• Intuitive executive reporting to allow management to be better at the way it reported its financial information to its board and executive as well as supporting analysis to resolve stakeholder queries.

Solution

Ramesys Global’s financial planning and reporting software was the perfect fit for the client. By simplifying the budgeting process using cost drivers such as tonnes mined/milled, consumable usage rates and unit prices along with automating and streamlining the financial planning process by:

• Working with the client team, we implemented the Ramesys intuitive budgeting solution over an 8-week period. This involved training key finance and operations users to reload their Excel budgets into the Ramesys format whilst supporting them as they built their first physical driven budget. 
• In parallel with this, our pre-configured data warehouse was implemented and configured to talk to the client ERP and physicals capture system. Actuals history, including transaction level detail was loaded and an automated process was put in place to load daily actuals overnight.
• Working with finance and operations end users, we created a comprehensive suite of management and executive reports.
  
  

Results

The Ramesys Budgeting, Forecasting and Reporting suite has provided enormous value including:

• Physicals driven budget:  the client had delivered their first budget in a matter of weeks. By working alongside the Ramesys implementation team they were now completely capable of managing all aspects of budgeting and forecasting preparation including the ability to maintain it internally.

• Collaboration: the mine planners in conjunction with the sales team had the ability to update production plans to give the sales team a clear view of mine output.
• Quick turnaround of updated costed forecasts: with the environment evolving rapidly as the client moved into full production, several forecasts are required monthly, sometimes even weekly. Revised production and sales plans could be rapidly flowed through the cost model to provide costed forecast revisions within hours.
• Clear and transparent reporting: allowed for regular reviews between finance, operations and sales based on simple to use reporting and drill throughs.
• Simple interactive reporting to the board and executive.
• All delivered within 12-week timeframe and total cost that is less than 1 FTE equivalent.