Whitehaven Coal set up IT systems and a remote operations centre from scratch within six months for two metallurgical coal mines it bought from BHP-Mitsubishi Alliance (BMA) at the end of last year.
Image credit: Whitehaven Coal.
BMA divested its Blackwater and Daunia mines in Queensland in October last year, with the transaction completed on April 2 this year.
April 2 was also the date that Whitehaven Coal needed to have a new technology environment in place to support the sites and the employees coming across in the transaction.
Chief information officer Nick Zafiris told the recent SAP NOW A/NZ conference the transaction did not include IT systems, although he said BHP had “assisted … with some data migration” as part of the transition.
Zafiris brought in DXC Technology to bolster resourcing for the six-month project, and to help set up the new environment.
DXC revealed its role in the project at the end of July, though many of the details at that time – including the full scope of works and how they were completed – were left out.
Zafiris said that Whitehaven “engaged DXC to help me build an SAP platform, a network, a remote operations centre, middleware, [and to contribute in] many areas” of the transition.
“As part of the acquisition there were no group systems coming across, so … it all had to be built in less than six months.”
The SAP platform is built on RISE with SAP S/4HANA Cloud, with DXC using its own implementation methodology, which is intended to shorten the time it takes to bed down the SAP system.
DXC brought about 300 people to the project, and SAP another 100.
Zafiris said that DXC and SAP acted as “extensions” of Whitehaven’s IT team and were able to work directly with functional leads such as finance and HR, without running everything through internal IT first.
The structure was necessary due to the truncated delivery timeframe.
“ERP transformations come with a myth that you can’t do it in the time horizon you’ve got,” Zafiris said.
“We were fortunate in some ways that the time couldn’t move, but also unfortunate because it created quite a bit of stress to say, ‘Can we actually achieve this?’
“We had to be brave. We had to make sure perfect didn’t get in the way of good enough.
“There was also no ‘us’ and ‘them’. I had to empower DXC to be an extension of my team, and SAP as well.”
Another thing that enabled delivery was that the scope of the ERP build was split into “releases”, with only the most critical functions – payroll, HR, finance and procurement – included in the first release, which went live April 2.
“We had a challenge to … take people from one employer to the other while still operating the mine,” Zafiris said.
“There were several group related processes [needed] – to build a payroll system, build a billing system, and to maintain stable operations to pay suppliers.”
Maintenance planning was another function that was included in the first release of the cloud-based ERP.
Zafiris said that sourcing configuration best-practice from DXC, and being targeted in its testing, helped to ensure the miner had systems with core functionality online for April 2.
At the same time, Zafiris said the miner had invested significant effort into business continuity planning (BCP) and ensuring that a ‘Plan B’ was ready and waiting, in case any core functionality was not ready by the April 2 deadline.
“We had to make sure we had BCP in place in case things didn’t work on April 2. So, in case I couldn’t pay people, what would I do?” Zafiris said.
“I couldn’t move the date. This was a multi-billion-dollar transaction. So had to have ‘Plan Bs’ in place,
“We focused a lot of our efforts on the ‘Plan Bs’ – more effort than say user acceptance testing.”
One ‘Plan B’ – around how SAP is accessed – had to be used for the first few weeks.
“On day one [April 2], I didn’t have the network to connect to SAP because … I had to build [it]. But because I’m on RISE, people could effectively log onto SAP via the internet. And we did that for about three weeks until the wide area network was built,” Zafiris said.
That access option is a ‘Plan B’ in case of any future issues with the WAN. “I know now if my WAN is down, I’ve got my internet as a ‘Plan B’,” he said.
Similarly, Zafiris said the work around BCP had left him confident that Whitehaven could ride out any future issues, given a backup option or process exists, and had been rigorously tested for April 2.
Zafiris said that the miner is now in the midst of the second “release” of work around capabilities being built into the SAP system, though he did not detail what this specific work looked like.
The remote operations centre set up as part of the broader work undertaken with DXC is based in Whitehaven’s Queensland office.
Metallurgical coal is used for steelmaking. Whitehaven also has thermal coal operations, which are used in the generation of electricity.