Mining consultancy suite on business software

KRC Mining Consultants has implemented a suite of Oracle software spanning enterprise resource planning, human resources, financials, document management and project management.

KRC is a consultancy specialising in the needs of mining and resource processing firms. It provides geological, geotechnical, mining engineering and costing services to the mining industry in Australia, Africa, South America, the Middle East and India. Based in Sydney, KRC has a team of 12 consultants.

“Our consultants get their hands dirty, often working at mining projects in remote parts of the world. The software systems we originally had in place for tracking projects were cumbersome, with data entry and manual sharing of information taking up significant amounts of our consultants’ day,” says Steve Franklin, CEO for KRC.

“After growing strongly for several years, we found ourselves hitting a productivity wall using our old [Â…] system and struggled to produce timely reports on project profitability, so we decided to look for a platform capable of supporting our growth,” he says.

After evaluating solutions from several software vendors, Dataweave was chosen to design, integrate and provide ongoing, remotely managed, support services for an Oracle E-Business Suite solution.

The solution incorporates modules to handle project costing, project tracking, project billing, consultant timesheets, accounting, financial reporting, document management and key human resources functions. All data is held in an Oracle database.

Employees can access the system via web browser from any location, using a secure sockets layer virtual private network (SSL-VPN).

The automatic integration of data between the modules of the suite has allowed KRC to improve both consultant productivity and their business visibility. Project progress updates, expense reports and timesheet data is now entered once by consultants, with information available instantly to all team members.

Consultants no longer need to key project data into multiple systems and then manually share documents. The solution now tracks all project documents, sharing documents and tracking revisions automatically. Reporting capabilities and executive dashboards built into the solution provide KRC with continuous visibility of project profitability and consultant utilisation.

Franklin explains: “We have already enormously improved the productivity of our consultants, slashing the time needed for project tracking and timesheet management to about 10 minutes per day. This is enough to free up several hours of additional billable time each week for every consultant.