Home / Blog / Light at the End of the Decline….Metaphorically Speaking
Light at the End of the Decline… Metaphorically Speaking
Author: Sonia Turner, Sales and Marketing Manager
Published: 1st January 2020
Our Sales and Marketing Manager, Sonia Turner gives insight into her experience over the past 5 years working with Scope Systems.
Usually a time of forward planning and New Year’s resolutions I thought I would instead share my reflections and take a look at my own half a decade of statistics with Scope Systems and in so doing better prepare me of the year ahead.
From a peak in 2012 of $US80 billion on global mining capital expenditure to the low of below $US30 billion in 2016, market conditions have since stabilised and is expected to be back above $US40 billion in 2020. Not exactly the heady heights of 2012 but certainly trending in the right direction.
If I look at our own performance, Scope systems has a number of statistics, these being based on the level of engagement of our incumbent base of 180+ mining clients and net new sales of our Pronto Mining ERP solutions and Mine Production Data Solution.
Interestingly over the course of the last 18 months, the level of engagement in our top clients has not only increased but the type of engagement has also changed to a more strategic partnership.
Over the last 12 months we have been asked to deliver solutions related to more enterprise business process consulting, change management, development of mobility applications and 3rd party integrations that give a richer overall user experience of their ERP investment.
An article published by Business News in 2019 highlighted 13 out of the 18 largest Gold producers in WA all use Scope Systems Pronto ERP Solutions as their business system of choice.
The hot topic in the office though, is the blend of new implementations over the last 24 months in relation to the previous years in the decade. First was the change in production to exploration – we markedly saw the down shift 4 years ago when the number of mining companies we were engaged with and going into production significantly declined to 4, and of those a number were considering care and maintenance or had decided on administration.
So came the new strategy of Scope Systems to develop an Exploration Mining ERP Solution that could provide a functionally rich experience such as a tenements management system but at a price point that suited the smaller juniors.
Over the half decade covering 2015 to 2020, from the end of the acknowledged downturn of 2012 to 2016, we saw 25 of the 38 implementations were for Exploration companies. And pleasingly a number of those were to smaller mining services companies that were once again winning contracts and seeing an upturn in the industry themselves.
Another statistic is the commodity rise and fall over the 5 years. Of the 38, only 10 are Gold Exploration whilst the rest are a mix of Copper, Mineral Sands, Lithium, Vanadium and Lead/Silver.
These numbers were consistent to the Gold Exploration figures published in the Western Australian Mineral and Petroleum Statistics Digest 2018-2019 that had Gold Exploration the second largest exploration capital increase to Iron Ore. In that period our stats also showed that over half of the 10 Gold exploration implementations happened in the last 12 months with the other half spread over the other 5 years.
Looking Ahead
For the rest of 2020, my own forecast seems to suggest that the general trend of Gold exploration in WA, moving to development and into production, will continue to grow and will help to continue to provide the light at the end of the decline.
With 25 years of mining expertise and being able to utilise that knowledge in the R&D of our core Business System (Pronto), Scope Systems has been able to offer our junior miners an exploration specific system. It is able to track all of their standard accounting functionality with the added benefit of also tracking all of their non-financial drilling and physicals data to accurately track the budget and actuals of their projects and leases.
If you would like more information or to have a chat about the general trends and what other mining companies similar to you are doing then please get in touch through the form below.
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