South Deep, one of SA`s leading gold mines, has added a `tailor-made`, R2.6 million, Financials system to its computing environment being developed by Rubico, the Johannesburg-based business components software company.
The two-year project went live in May, giving the mine`s management one of the most flexible and function-rich Financials solutions in the mining industry, as it has been customised to not only to meet the mining industry`s specific needs, but also those of the company itself.
"By using our building-blocks approach to software development, we were able to build a system specific to their requirements," says Duncan Hastie, manager of the four-man Rubico team responsible for the project.
"As important, the solution, being components-based software, is totally flexible and can be quickly and inexpensively adapted to meet changing needs and so avoids product obsolescence." This flexibility has already been put to the test as the company underwent an ownership change while the project was underway. Placer Dome and Western Areas now owns the gold mining interests of the South African mining conglomerate, JCI Ltd, forming the new South Deep gold mine.
The Financials systems is the fourth of five Rubico projects at the mine, which is phasing out five older systems that were run on a 20-year-old centralised mainframe. Rubico`s planned maintenance, commercial services and stores systems went live between 12 and 18 months ago. Human Resources is due to come on stream within the next few months.
Speed to implementation has been a critical factor. The old mainframe was costing as much as R20 million a year to maintain and the first project had to be rolled out rapidly to ensure Y2K compliance.
"Rubico`s methodology is to spend as much time in gathering business requirements, planning and prototyping a system as we do deploying it. Every aspect is tested and verified as we progress to ensure implementation is as hitch-free as possible.
"Two years from concept to delivery on a project of this scope and integration complexity illustrates how components-based development ensures rapid delivery," he says.
"Keeping control of costs in the mining industry is critical. Labour and production overheads are massive, so management needs to know exactly what`s happening throughout its operations, which is what they now have with the Rubico system," says Hastie.
Workflow processes, such as expenditure authorisations necessitating approvals from several people, have also been streamlined and automated and data capture has been standardised.
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