Continue reading of some examples where Astral has provided value to Mining organisations, through Enterprise Information Management solutions by clicking on the links below.

Links

• Astral Use Case – EIM Value – Mining Sector – Astral
• Value Case 1: Global Oil & Gas Exploration Organisation – Astral
• Value Case 2: Global Mining Organisation – Astral
• Value Case 4: Global Mining Organisation – Astral

Introduction

With global operations across more than 100 countries and 350 operational sites, this Astral client provides services to help mobilise the vital resources required by mining companies globally. Their core business strategy is to be the global leader in the provision of high service consumables to the mining and infrastructure markets, leveraged to long-term increases in production and development volumes.

Astral was engaged by the business to deliver the implementation of a global Controlled Document management solution to drive regulatory compliance together with business efficiency via a consistent approach across all sites.

The Business Challenges

The lack of a common global Controlled Documents solution had led to a multitude of inefficiencies within the respective business processes, creating associated Health & Safety, operational risk and compliance issues within their highly regulated operating environment.

Including:

• No consistency in the management of Controlled Documents across the organisation.
• Controlled Documents can be stored in multiple applications making it difficult to quickly locate the latest document.
• Risk of a major safety incidents if the wrong Controlled Document was used to perform a critical business process.
• Some Controlled Documents are not being reviewed in line with compliance obligations.
• Due to issues searching for documents, some users will download documents to local drives for easy access in the future, creating duplicates and risking that the latest version is not accessed.
• Incorrect metadata values are assigned to some documents.
• There are too many manual steps required to manage the review and approval of a new/updated controlled document.

The Business Solution

With Astral having previously worked with the organisation to set their ECM Strategy and Roadmap, the organisation chose to leverage their prior investment in an existing ECM and implement a Controlled Document Framework (CDF) within their existing ECM platform.

This provided a central repository in which all Controlled Documents would be managed, in adherence to the organisation’s specified regulatory and compliance obligations globally.

Central to the CDF solution and the resulting business efficiencies realised, was the implementation of automated business process workflows that drove the management of each Controlled Document throughout its lifecycle – e.g. creation of new document, periodic review and approval of a document, obsoletion of a document.

Automated notifications ensured that the responsible users received timely alerts when action was required including the ability to escalate to management when deadlines were missed.

Where the ECM’s integration with SAP seamlessly provided direct access to the latest approved and released Controlled Document from within SAP AWM processes.  This ensured that the end users could confidently know they were accessing the latest approved and released copy of a document.

The Business Benefits

Initiated as a global information governance program – where Astral’s global Controlled Document management solution was delivered leveraging Astral’s delivery methodology – the business benefits instilled an underlying culture of treating information as an asset at the operational site level.  

Where the greater benefits included:

• • Driving a consistent approach to the management of Controlled Documents.
  • One place to find site, regional and corporate Controlled Documents.
  • Enable capture of best practice, increased knowledge share and re-use.
  • Clear and auditable version history maintained for every document.
  • Ensure adherence to compliance obligations.
  • Improved productivity through process automation.