SAP accreditation boosts Barnstone's mining focus

SAP has accredited a specialised mining solution developed by local professional services company, Barnstone. The Barnstone Mining Solution leverages Barnstone's extensive mining experience to create a pre-configured version of SAP's All-in-One software for the mining industry.

“Mid-market mining companies face a double challenge: reducing costs, while gaining the flexibility to move rapidly into niche areas in a highly dynamic marketplace,” says Conrad Steyn, business development director at Barnstone.

“The Barnstone Mining Solution gives mining clients access to the industry-leading processes and functionality embedded in SAP — optimised for the mining industry, cost-effective and at reduced risk. The experience and focus of our implementation team, combined with the solution's predefined project approaches and plans, means the Barnstone Mining Solution can be live within 100 days — another huge benefit.”

The solution offers financial management, project systems, plant maintenance, procure-to-pay and inventory management modules at a fixed price. Once it is stabilised, clients have the option to build on the solution. Industry-specific solutions like Barnstone Mining Solution provide clients with easy access to SAP's intellectual capital in business processes that really generate business.

The solution has been live at Rand Uranium since August 2010. “The Barnstone Mining Solution was quick to implement, and has already helped us to reduce costs, while improving performance,” says Mike Gallagher, CIO, Rand Uranium. “And the fact that we could run a comprehensive demo helped make our decision to implement that much easier.”

Barnstone has been a member of the SAP Partner Programme since 2008. “Value-added resellers such as Barnstone are selected for their professional strength, customer successes and SAP applications expertise. SAP is excited about this certification, which follows intensive and vigorous quality checks and processes, and they exceeded every stage,” says Desmond Nair, Director of Ecosystem and Channel at SAP Africa.

“We believe that Barnstone's certification will benefit the mining industry and provide benefits such as short-term return on investment, medium- to long-term expansion, innovative approaches, easily accessible enhancements and no disruption, due to the choice of functionality deployed through enhancement packs.”