It is through the connected, digital mine that mining companies will be able to reduce costs, maximise operations, increase productivity and deliver shareholder value. This is why companies who have a serious cost focus use XERAS Enterprise. Not only is XERAS Enterprise one of the industry’s leading zero-based budgeting solutions, it is a true enterprise platform for the cost -focused organisation. 

Michael Baldwin, EGM Product Strategy at RPMGlobal, said: “From the recent reporting season it’s official. The world’s lowest cost producers, mining companies with a real focus on cost, use XERAS. XERAS Enterprise is the industry’s leading zero-based budgeting solution. With SAP certified integration, XE delivers a live forecasting environment, significantly reducing the time it takes to generate budgets and forecasts, delivering companies an accurate financial position, at any given time.”

With a single button click, companies can visually see the complete cost driver tree for a department, a mine or the entire organisation. Baldwin explained: “This is incredibly powerful when trying to understand the fundamentals of your business and, more importantly, drive a cost focused organisation. This level of visibility and understanding is something a business [that is] run on excel sheets can never deliver.”

He added: “With this new release, our customers now have the ability to take these cost drivers and run real-time sensitivity and plan variance analysis. This allows users to rapidly understand how changes to each driver impacts their business and plan accordingly. For example, users can adjust supply contracts, run commodity price scenarios and understand the impacts of currency fluctuations. Any cost driver, or combination, can be adjusted and XE will instantly re-calculate the entire forecast from a zero base. The ability to run rapid scenarios like this and understand the true impact each driver has on the business is something you can’t do when your forecast is spread across multiple spreadsheets! The ability to do this through a mobile interface is a great real world example of today’s digital mine where information is delivered with context, amplifying the abilities of key decision makers within a business.” 

The ability to compare budget and forecast versions against actual spend and get behind the high level numbers is another key new feature. Scenario and Version Control Manager does the heavy lifting and automatically generates waterfall comparison chart for presentations. Again all this is something that is impossible to do in a spreadsheet, or any other package for that matter. 

Baldwin concluded: “The question I would be asking if I was a CEO, CFO or financial controller of a mining organisation would be ‘Do we have a serious cost focus underpinned with XERAS, or are we focused on managing uncontrolled and bespoke spreadsheets?’”

XERAS Analytics is available now and the latest upgrades to the XERAS family of products is available to all existing clients.