Mining solutions provider Weir Minerals upgraded its business management system to Infor LN from January 1, as its business had grown from shipping between 2 000 and 3 000 parts a day to shipping between 5 000 and 8 000 parts a day, Weir Minerals CEO Dave Athey said at business software and service provider Infor’s On the Road conference, held in Johannesburg earlier this month.

Athey explained that Weir Minerals first worked with Infor’s partner, business software company Softworx, after Weir Minerals’ acquisition of pumps group Warman in 2008.

“At that stage, our biggest problem was on-time delivery. “Our on-time delivery statistics were less than 30%; we had lead times longer than 20 weeks and a backlog of more than six months,” he said.

Other issues, such as the different enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems used by the businesses, were also identified.

“The one business was running on the Baan system, while the other was using iScala.

“After an assessment, it was clear that the Baan system was much more suited to the manufacturing process we were using and we decided that we would eventually want to consolidate the platforms.”

During the economic downturn in 2009, Weir Minerals had additional resources and time to progress the ERP rationalisation, and Softworx was contracted, Athey said.

“The decision was made to grow the Baan system into both sides of the business and, in collaboration with Softworx and other consultants, we rolled out a complete and consolidated ERP solution in seven months,” he added.

Since 2009, Weir Minerals has also acquired two other businesses, one of which was rubber products company Linatex and, by 2012, the business of Weir Minerals had doubled, Athey said.

Weir Minerals then decided to upgrade to Infor LN, he said, adding that there was also a newer version of the technology under development, to which Weir Minerals would upgrade in June or July this year.

“We have had a good experience working with Softworx and are looking forward to the new application,” he said.

Infor’s Offering
Infor has a focused approach to the way in which it goes to market and it is 100% driven by industry, Infor business consulting director Phil Lewis says.

“We are not a single-solution company; we do not believe that, for example, the same ERP system can be used to manage mining equipment and processes in the food and beverage industry,” he tells Mining Weekly.

Focusing only on the top-level industry is not sufficient and Infor, therefore, works on a microverti-cal level.

“For example, the headline ver- tical might be equipment, but, within that, we would have the specific microvertical of mining equipment, which ensures that we fully meet our customers’ specific requirements.”

Further, Infor delivers what could be seen as a suite of solutions in the form of a single solution.

“Our approach to delivering those application suites is called Internet architecture. We deliver our solutions in a loosely coupled way, using standards-based integration.

“As is the case with the Internet, which was used as a template to develop the approach, Infor’s approach is highly flexible,” Lewis adds.

The final aspect of Infor’s product strategy focuses on ‘beauty as a competence’.

“One of our core competences is to deliver beautiful software. This is software that not only looks good but also provides efficiency for end-users, which allows them to act faster. We provide information that is within the context of what the user is doing,” he adds.

Infor’s social business strategy is driven by the way in which consumers use technology at home, Lewis says, adding that the technology is based on com-munication, but value is added to the communication by allowing people to follow applications and machines in the same way that people are followed on Facebook and Twitter.

“For example, if a piece of equipment of a mining company is down and there is an outstand-ing service order on it, the piece of equipment will in effect tweet you to say that it is back on line as soon as that service order has been completed,” he explains.