Mincom research reveals top challenges for miners

The study found that the highest-ranked priority amongst those surveyed is ensuring workplace safety.
Initially focused on the North American market, the study polled more than 100 leading mining companies to reveal what high-level mining executives consider to be the most pressing business challenges facing their enterprises today, and how they intend to protect profits and drive growth in the current economy.
The study’s respondents - 88 per cent of whom are vice presidents and CEOs, or head operations or finance - were asked to identify their current challenges by level of urgency, yielding these responses:
. Ensuring workplace safety (71 per cent)
. Improving performance and operational effectiveness (67 per cent)
. Managing capital projects (46 per cent)
. Recruiting and retaining a skilled workforce (38 per cent)
. Addressing environmental concerns (37 per cent)
“Not surprisingly, safety remains the highest priority for leaders in the global mining community,” said Jennifer Tejada, chief strategy officer and executive vice president, Mincom. “It’s a complex topic, but two mission-critical areas companies must address to ensure a safe work environment are reliable assets and high-quality work practices.”
“As the leading provider of enterprise solutions to the world’s top mining organisations, Mincom believes these research findings underscore the need for solutions that are field driven, crossing the chasm between actual physical asset conditions in the field, often in remote locations, and improving the service chain of those assets, through to accurately costing and reporting on the entire asset life cycle,” she said.
Respondents were also asked to identify their biggest obstacles to organic company growth, leading to the following results by industry sector:
. Across all mining companies, the top obstacle to organic growth is “complying with government regulations.”
. Among coal mining companies in particular, “decline in market demand” was the biggest hindrance.
. For gold and copper mining companies, “delays in getting new mines operational” topped the list.
The new research also discovered a significant disconnect between many companies’ top business objectives, and the processes and technologies required to support them.
Eighty seven per cent of respondents named “pursuing an aggressive cost-control strategy” as their top method for maintaining profitability in the current economy. Yet 57 per cent of these executives say they lack systems that demonstrate the correlation of operational metrics and financial results, making it difficult to quantifiably establish which controls are the most effective.
Similarly, 79 per cent of executives said they intend to better integrate their financial planning with all departments and control systems, with 73 per cent saying their organisations are building an accurate operational model that links predictive production costs to operations and finance. But only 26 per cent say they possess an integrated software system to compile production information across multiple mines and processing facilities for group reporting.
“Among our key findings is the continued prevalence of time-consuming and error-prone manual roll-ups and reconciliations being performed across mining facilities in an attempt to achieve enterprise-level views of performance and costs,” said Tejada. “This is just one area where information technology can deliver enormous benefits - in this case, unified software solutions optimised for mining and designed to power accurate, timely enterprise views.”
Mincom intends to perform this survey annually in key regions around the world to track the top challenges in mining, and to gauge how mining organisations successfully address them.

For a full summary of results and analysis visit: http://www.mincom.com/en/resources/type/whitepapers/WP-MiningExecInsights2010.aspx