Prev Next

Business Improvement and Integrated Planning

Siecap is a project management and advisory firm specialising in providing a full range of corporate and operational services across the asset and investment lifecycle which assist our to clients optimise cost, increase performance and manage risk.

Business improvement and process development project for largest thermal coal producer in South Africa, with revenues of USD 800M (2012-13) from 11.3MT coal shipped across 6 product blends

The Background

Customer experienced higher business complexity and uncertainty due to more volatile markets, increasing variability in product qualities, aging of the coal chain infrastructure, increasing costs (USD 189M) and introduction of asset based optimisation

There was a general recognition that the existing business was weak in integrated planning, with each component attempting to optimise independently with a strong longer term focus

How the Siecap team helped

Rapid situation appraisal and benchmarking of the operations and supply chain to identify the size of the prize

Detailed definition of the strategy, processes, policies, decision rights, organisational design, interactions, system requirements, assumptions and performance management for integrated planning from life of mine planning, 1-3 year horizon down to day of operations

The Results

Set up medium term planning cycle linking already existing long and short term cycles, increasing utilisation and through put

Designed the new strategic objective of value generation through a set of policies and business rules that drive value trade-off decisions, alignment of accountabilities for effective decision making and high level of data integrity and transparency

Established new distribution of responsibility and decision rights between all stakeholders within the coal chain