Abstract
This presentation will discuss ways a forward-looking mining organization, DMC Mining Services (DMC), increased accuracy of reporting and made operational and financial improvements on their projects. DMC is a global provider of underground mine contracting services and is known for technical excellence, innovation, efficiency, and uncompromising safety. Their team was using Microsoft Excel spreadsheets as their primary reporting tool and project control platform as many other organizations do. However, the results were not satisfactory and they knew needed to have a more secure, standardized, and scalable solution to meet their project controls needs.
DMC sought a project controls system that would provide them with a systematic pathway for monitoring, controlling, and forecasting projects. After a thorough review of the potential options, they found that ARES PRISM software met (and even exceeded in some areas) their operational and business requirements. Some of DMC’s software criteria included:
- Proven Success in the Mining Industry: Since ARES PRISM was already being used by many of DMC’s mining partners, there was credibility and confidence in their selection.
- Global Presence: Since DMC has projects in many locations around the globe; they wanted to make sure that their software tool also had a global presence and would be scalable for future growth.
- System Integration: DMC had many decentralized systems of project data and they wanted to find a way to bring their data together and eliminate multiple data entries.
- Implementation Timeline: As an out-of-the-box solution, ARES PRISM can be rolled out quickly. It was also important to DMC that there would be post-implementation support that they could rely on.
Now that project controls software has been successfully implemented at DMC Mining Services, they have made it a company standard for use on their projects and are already starting to see great benefits across the organization.
-100% Improvement in Turnaround Time: Before implementing ARES PRISM, it took a lot of effort to generate an earned value graph. “With PRISM, our turnaround time has improved 100% and we are able to generate information for senior management in a timely manner.”
-Financial Benefits and Operational Improvements: “PRISM is facilitating company success and is an ‘enabler’ to achieving business goals.”
-Increased Accuracy of Reporting: DMC has seen an increase in data accuracy and overall confidence in the data output. “For DMC, it is very important to produce accurate and reliable reports periodically to assess our projects in a timely manner. The earned value analysis represented by the S-curve graph comes in very handy. In today’s fast-paced environment, it is necessary to ensure that the project’s designated resources are spent properly. These reports need to be accompanied by key metrics to identify variances and understand the current project performance such as Cost Variance, Schedule Variance, Schedule Performance Index (SPI), and Cost Performance Index (CPI).”
-Resource Optimization: “Resource optimization is evident as PRISM has allowed for the replacement and in some aspects the complete elimination of previous manual data entry and cleaning processes.”