As a leading diversified mining services company based in Australia, with a growing world-class portfolio of mining operations, there are significant data challenges. Firstly, there are multiple large projects on the go, from managing both greenfield and brownfield mining and beneficiation projects (mainly owned by global top 5 mining companies), to asset expansion projects at mines actually owned in-house. Secondly there’s also the day-to-day running of many operations at both self-owned and co-managed mine sites. This means that despite its smaller size, this customer has more spare parts, assets, and services to purchase and look after than many of our tier-one miners. And with this large footprint of mine sites, plants & ports, comes a very wide purchased commodity spread.
In the short term, a large amount of item and service data from Coupa, Excel, and other systems had to be commodity coded to UNSPSC, catalogued with engineering descriptions, and reloaded back. This was particularly important for certain remote sites within Western Australia and the Northern Territory Areas where spend visibility needed the most improvement. Key spend groups included light and heavy vehicles, crushers, separation equipment and general spares. The project is ongoing, but the next phase of detailed cleansing of purchased item descriptions seems well placed to expose significant new savings for both procurement and engineering during 2023.