Services for the Metals & Mining Industry: South Africa

The traditional foundation of the South African economy, the mining and metals industry, faces significant challenges.

The mining industry in South Africa has felt the impact of globalisation profoundly. Local companies are expanding internationally and new competitors are entering the market. The commodities boom is driving higher production, but profitability remains paramount especially given the strong rand.

As supply chains lengthen and mining houses consolidate, the pressure to create efficient organisations standardised on best practice is growing. Shared services and full-scale outsourcing are increasingly being seen as tools to help achieve these goals, advancing these companies along the road towards high performance.

Another key factor in mining is that commodity prices are generally beyond the control of the seller; hence cost control remains a perennial goal for miners.

South Africa's large mineral reserves (35 percent of the world's gold, 55.7 percent of platinum group metals, 80 percent of manganese, 68.3 percent of chrome and 21 percent of titanium) ensure that mining will remain an important industry. Accenture can help it improve performance.

Accenture delivers consulting and outsourcing services to help clients succeed in the challenging metals and mining environment. We combine our global experience of the industry, our deep insight into business process and our knowledge of the local market, partnering with clients to help them achieve high performance across the entire supply chain.

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We work with metals and mining companies in several key areas:

Creating effective strategies and organizations
Accenture teams with companies to understand the changes taking place in the industry and identify critical challenges, potential high-return improvements, and opportunities to grow and profit. We help companies strengthen their strategic position within the industry and create merger and acquisition strategies, determining how value may be created, evaluating candidates and structuring agreements. We also help clients create organic growth opportunities, and establish flexible lower-cost businesses that can keep pace with fast-moving opportunities.

Transforming operations
With the largest supply chain management group in the world, Accenture collaborates with metals companies to develop flexible, responsive supply chains designed to bring enhanced revenue, reduced costs and stronger relationships with suppliers and customers. We also help companies redesign procurement processes to achieve significant savings in materials and supplies costs. And we work with clients to eliminate inefficiencies and increase output in manufacturing using our proven step-change methodology, which targets quick wins and then builds on those successes to drive sustainable improvements in business performance.

Deploying industry-specific enterprise solutions
We collaborate closely with technology vendors to help clients get the most out of enterprise systems. For example, we offer the Accenture Enhanced Enterprise Solution for Metals which simplifies the implementation of SAP enterprise systems while giving companies a comprehensive set of tools and functions tailored to their specific needs. With sophisticated accelerators—such as templates, extensions and configurations—this innovative solution enables companies to put a proven and reliable SAP solution in place quickly and cost-effectively, giving companies a powerful platform for managing and integrating increasingly complex and far-flung operations.

Outsourcing for change and improvement
In our outsourcing efforts, we draw on our worldwide network of outsourcing delivery centres to bring quality, continuity, predictability and consistency to processes. Through our Application Outsourcing services, we address technology, strategic alignment, integration, business processes and human performance to help companies create IT organisations that can control costs while keeping up with rapidly changing technologies.By using Accenture’s Infrastructure Outsourcing services, we create low-cost, high-value solutions for the entire enterprise.” Our Business Process Outsourcing offerings focus on processes such as finance and accounting, supply chain management, human resources and procurement, delivering optimal performance at lower cost and producing quantifiable results in areas such as share price, market position and return on capital.