SAP implementation in Barrick’s gold digital transformation
Barrick’s new transactional system, SAP S4 HANA, has gone live at Nevada Gold Mines and will be rolled out across the entire group in the course of 2021.
The implementation lays one of the key foundations for the group to reap the benefits of becoming truly digital and will enable a new level of real-time decision-making as well as a more agile and business-led approach to systems and data-driven initiatives.
The project stayed on track with a very ambitious timeline despite the obvious challenges presented by the pandemic, with the legacy Newmont sites going live on August 1 and the rest of Nevada Gold Mines on October 1.
Head of group systems integration, Nico Hoffman, says that “by keeping the global design standardized and focused on getting the basics right, we have set up the rest of the implementations for success and paved the way for them to be completed on time”.
Training adopted a new approach, formulated during Barrick’s strategy sessions earlier this year. This involved identifying particularly talented individuals who were added to a pool of ‘super-users’ inside the various business functions.
These users take up ownership of the system by acting as the first line of support for issues as well as by driving continuous incremental improvement of the core application. Almost immediately they began delivering refinements and improvements which will be included in future rollouts.
“This project demonstrates the value of having both a very clear end goal and the correct level of executive functional sponsorship on board from the very beginning and we look forward to seeing the results of applying this to future developments,” Hoffman said.
The SAP rollout coincides with the start of a number of equally ambitious initiatives including a common global data platform, a new financial reporting and planning system, as well as various operational technology enhancements, rationalizations and unifications. It also signals the end of siloed local customizations which previously stood in the way of one true global solution.
