Unlike those businesses operating in other industries, mining companies have to deal with market volatility far more frequently. These organisations have little control over the demand for, the supply of, and the pricing of their product, but still have to make strategic decisions – regardless of what the markets are doing. These decisions are not just limited to exploration and the extraction of raw materials, but also operational choices to maximise the efficiency of the business. Publicly traded mining companies like Seriti also have to provide accurate, forward-looking financial reports.
Seriti, a broad-based, 91% black-owned and controlled South African mining company, therefore decided to invest in a financial and operational planning, budgeting and forecasting platform with advanced modelling and scenario analysis capabilities. Seriti chose Oracle as a result of the reliability, speed and effectiveness of its EPM platform, with Futuresense as the implementation partner.
Co-owned by four shareholders, Seriti is currently Eskom’s largest black-controlled coal supplier, with mines across South Africa. Its subsidiary, Seriti Coal, operates three large-scale, opencast and underground thermal coal mines, with another being developed. The company also recently acquired the operations of SA Coal Holdings Proprietary Limited (SAEC), which added four more mines to Seriti’s portfolio.
Seriti was using Excel for its reporting, making the process extremely time consuming, so the company was looking to the implementation of Oracle Cloud EPM Financial Consolidation and Close (FCC) to speed up the reporting process. FCC not only allows for more accurate and faster reporting, but ensures that all processes are dependable and correct, transparent, compliant and auditable.
FCC has been designed so that it can be configured to fit individual organisations’ requirements. Using best practices and years’ worth of knowledge and expertise, Futuresense built Seriti an application that met all of the mining company’s needs.
In order to ensure that Seriti’s solution was tailored to the company’s needs – and to ensure that all of the correct data was used – Futuresense built each report in Excel before moving it across to the cloud platform. [Hanlie?] explains that while this was a relatively time-consuming task, the fact that the Seriti finance team took responsibility for the data made it much easier.
“Projects fail when clients are not involved, and if there is no change management process. The Seriti team, however got involved from the very beginning and stayed involved the whole way through. In fact, this project was rather unique because the client was the driving force behind all of the milestones, as well as change management in the company,” she says.
Jan Bronkhorst, Seriti’s Group Logistics Manager, says that the project ran almost exactly to his expectations, mainly as a result of how the Futuresense team led the Seriti team through the process. “We were let into the environment at a very early stage and shown the ropes so that we could also help with the work that had to be done. The outcome was that we were getting on-the-job training and learnt very fast how things worked,” he explains.
Bronkhorst agrees that teamwork made this project a success, adding that when there were challenges, the Futuresense team always ensured that everyone was kept informed. “The team did not go away to find the solutions. We were kept involved and we were always shown how to deal with those challenges. This was very special to us and led to an early empowerment of the Seriti team,” he says.
Seriti started seeing the benefits of the FCC implementation almost immediately, according to Bronkhorst. Seriti now has faster financial close cycles, consistent, accurate and reliable reports, as well as greater insight into the origin of the data they use. Essentially, the reporting and consolidation process is faster and more accurate, allowing the finance team to focus more on other strategic tasks.
