Aiming to further enhance efficiencies while continuously driving down costs, Impala Platinum Holdings (Implats), one of the world's leading platinum producers, is changing its business systems to mySAP ERP, the latest product from global enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution giant, SAP.
The deal consolidates SAP's dominance as a solution provider to the global platinum industry and increases its share of the international mining industry as a whole.
Implats will roll-out all the basic core modules of mySAP ERP suite to its mines in Rustenburg, Steelpoort, Zimbabwe and its refineries in Springs and its head office in Gauteng in a first-phase period of eight months starting in June 2005.
Core modules will include finance and costing, human resources, plant maintenance, project systems, procurement, business warehousing, and environmental health and safety, followed by a portal implementation. The second phase of the implementation will focus on driving business benefit from the core modules by enhancing business processes and exploiting mySAP ERP's advanced functionality.
Implats group consulting engineer of assets and risk, Mike Rossouw, says: "We were careful to choose both our software supplier and our implementation partner, Accenture, based on their insight into and experience of standard SAP best practice, because we want to assimilate that best practice across the group as rapidly as possible.
"Our legacy business system had carried us for a long time, but we'd got to the stage where the suppliers are withdrawing support and the potential for technical failure was significant. Also, we had high distribution and low integration of various systems, limiting visibility into and control of the business.
"We therefore investigated, locally and internationally, business systems that would give us comprehensive integration capabilities and therefore the ability to drive continuous improvement. We also wanted a solution that was suitable specifically for large-scale mining operations.
"At the same time, we wanted to rationalise and refresh our entire infrastructure - from standardising our operating system and desktops and rationalising our servers to increasing bandwidth across our network.
"All of which meant we were looking for a single instance of software that could both meet our business process requirements and make the rationalisation project easier. Not an easy ask.
"SAP came out best - because of its ability to meet most of our requirements in the short-term and the opportunity it gives us to grow into the future based on its relentless, ongoing expansion and enhancement of the functionality of its products."
Rossouw believes the eight-month implementation period is "tight but not unreasonable" because the project team includes full representation by Implats function specialists who will not only represent the interests of end-users but also ensure every member of the team is focused on delivering a single, consistent operational template for the group.
Implats has also acknowledged that effective change management is the key to succeeding with such a large and complex implementation.
"The constraints on a project like this are never about the technology," Rossouw says. "They're always about the degree of change that can be tolerated by the people in the organisation. So, we're providing comprehensive training for our approximately 1 500 users - from basic computer literacy and SAP navigation to roles-based and integration process training. By the time we go live, our users will understand exactly how what they do impacts on everyone else."
SAP's Greg Nethercote agrees with Implats' emphasis on change management. "We never sell a solution without recommending - and, where requested, assisting with - a full change management programme, because ERP is not a technology or even a business process shift, it's a mindset shift. Implats has the organisational development and performance management vision to understand that."
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