Case study: Australian Mining Contractor Management
No one can doubt the importance of effective contractor management for the health and safety of workers, particularly contractors. Their importance has often been highlighted by Australian miners, who perhaps face the greatest risk of workplace injury and have a great need for Contractor Management.
To protect workers, the Australian mining industry are re-examining their processes and how they manage every aspect of their operation. They are striving for greater visibility in order to gain a deep understanding of how they work, who works, and their workflow, in particular with contractors.
Despite a greater need for sourcing, reporting, tracking and performance management, visibility remains clouded and there is added pressure for cost efficiencies and greater productivity. Iluka and a major miner provided us with details about their plans to improve governance, increase visibility in real time, and control over contracting activities. They focused on five major aspects to gain this greater control:
- Contracts including worker histories, skills, insurance and key dates
- Sourcing including procurement planning procedures and time frames
- Management including performance KPIs and milestones
- Workflows and business processes
- Project Management including prioritization, project cash flow, and issue management.
Specific to the mining industry, they face the problem of dealing with a number of different sites which all have their own ways of operating. They needed a single source system that not only provided greater visibility, but also a common operating process that ensured the same measurability and reporting for each project or mine. The two businesses turned to contractor management software that provided them with the greater visibility and support they needed combined with the capacity to remotely access the data.
They recognized the benefits of a wide ranging contract management system, which enabled them to eliminate multiple individual registers and databases and manage the entire contract life-cycle in one centralize system. As well as making the process more efficient, it also uncovered inefficiencies in the existing practices, allowing the miners to eliminate poor processes. The miners commented that they have greater oversight and visibility on what is happening within projects, in regards to contracts and procurement, providing information for effective analysis and decision making.
