Customised planning and budgeting
Introduction
Seriti, a broad-based, 91% black-owned and controlled South African mining company, operates three large-scale, opencast and underground thermal coal mines which supply Eskom’s Lethabo, Tutuka and Kriel power stations. In addition, after acquiring the operations of SA Coal Holdings, Seriti gained access to another four mines in order to provide coal to the Kendal and Duvha power stations.
The miner, which exports coal via the Richards Bay Coal Terminal, is also developing a new mine in stages to provide additional coal supplies to Seriti’s various coal markets. Introduction Any well-run business starts with a plan, and a mining operation is no exception. In fact, planning and budgeting are even more essential to the effective running of a mine than most businesses because a mine requires a different mix of cost and revenue every year to maintain production and profitability.
Depending on whether the mine is at an early, mid or late stage within its life cycle, it will have very different cost profiles. As a result, mines require detailed planning, and can’t simply use last year’s plans/actuals as a base for the next few years’ plans. With a detailed plan in place, management can allocate and prepare the necessary resources required to meet the mine’s anticipated demands, including all of the economic, environmental, and social aspects that miners have to take into consideration.
This type of planning can be extremely complex and time-consuming – particularly if the mine is using Excel for the bulk of its financial data. When Seriti, one of South Africa’s largest coal mining operations encountered this challenge, the company decided to invest in an EPM solution to speed up and improve its planning and budgeting process.
Meeting the miner’s needs
Futuresense’s team of skilled and experienced consultants were happy to accept the challenge, immediately embarking on the preliminary steps of the implementation journey. “One of the most important factors in ensuring the success of an EPM project of this magnitude is working closely with the client to ensure that we establish a true partnership.
Despite the daunting timelines, the team started engaging with Tourvest straightaway,” says Nicole Astfalck, Associate Director of Futuresense Together, Tourvest and Futuresense put a plan together that would ensure that the company’s goals could be achieved. “OneStream’s ability to combine financial consolidation, planning, budgeting and reporting processes while accommodating diverse financial structures, intricate ownership relationships and multiple currencies, made it the ideal platform to help eliminate our point solutions, particularly our reliance on Excel, and improve our decision-making capabilities.
Futuresense took the time to understand our diverse business and our specific needs, which is one of the main reasons that we were able to transform our financial processes in a very short time,” explains Kagiso Sereme, Financing Manager at Tourvest. “Futuresense’s commitment to excellence came through at every stage of the project.
With a limited time to build the solution, everyone had to put in a lot of overtime, and the dynamic Futuresense team provided support and expertise whenever it was needed – even if it was late at night or on a weekend,” she adds. One of the implementation’s most time-consuming tasks was the data mapping that would ensure Tourvest’s data and processes were completely unified, not merely connected in separate modules. With multiple ERPs to consolidate, not to mention navigating the company’s complex organisational structures, Futuresense had to make sure the right groundwork was done, with the team spending many hours charting and integrating Tourvest’s vast data estate.
A collaborative effort
“Our longstanding partnership with Futuresense ensured we got the right results with this project. The Futuresense team’s understanding of our business, their commitment to excellence, and their incredible work ethic ensured that we got a bespoke planning and budgeting solution tailored specifically to our needs in just [6/8] months,” says Alan Kotze,
Lead Management Reporting and Operations Support at Seriti Power. Rothman says that the success of the project was largely as a result of Seriti’s engagement. “The Seriti team was engaged in the process every step of the way, speeding up a number of activities that could have taken far longer to complete. We held joint workshops every two weeks to ensure that the solution was being built to Seriti’s exact needs, allowing us to adjust as necessary as the project progressed.
In fact, Seriti took this collaborative approach one step further with a number of their team members championing the solution internally to help speed up user adoption and provide confidence in the system across the business.”
