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BPX Interview: Tony Kinnane of Runge and Brindusa Radulescu of SAP AG

Tony Kinnane of RungeTony Kinnane of Runge

Tony Kinnane of Runge Brindusa Radulescu of SAP AG 
 Tony Kinnane of Runge Brindusa Radulescu of SAP AG

 

A key partnership that signaled the successful momentum and growth of the Industry Value Network (IVN) for the Mining community is the collaboration between SAP AG and Australian Mining software vendor Runge. In this 13-minute BPX podcast, Tony Kinnane (Managing Director of Runge) tells Kieran O'Connor about the development of this strategic partnership, while Brindusa Radulescu (SAP Lead in the IVN for Mining) reflects on the evolution of the IVN and previews upcoming focus topics within the community.

 

 

Podcast Transcript

 

Kieran O'Connor: Hello and welcome to the first BPX Podcast for the Mining Community. My name is Kieran O'Connor, Communications Lead with SAP's Process Industry Cluster. Today, we are speaking to Brindusa Radulescu of SAP and Tony Kinnane of SAP for Mining software partner Runge. Brindusa is Industry Value Network (otherwise known as IVN) Lead for the Mining Community, while Tony Kinnane is Managing Director of Runge, a key strategic partner of the IVN for Mining.
Welcome to you both.

Before we start into the interview, perhaps you'd like to introduce yourselves. Tony, maybe you'd like to start?

 

Tony Kinnane: My background with Runge goes back 21 years. I joined them in 1986 as General Manager. My professional background is first as a qualified Mining Engineer and a Geologist second. Later on in life I became a Mine Manager. Since 1992 I've been Managing Director of Runge, which has progressed to the point where we're now a publicly-listed company on the Australian stock exchange with a market capital of $140mil AUD, with 340 plus people in 17 offices located in 10 countries around the world. That's a bit of my background: I've been Managing Director of Runge for about 16 years.

 

Kieran O'Connor: Brindusa, would you like to describe your own background.

 

Brindusa Radulescu: I joined SAP seven years ago and I'm working with the Industry. I was part of the Oil&Gas team. The last couple of years I spent with the Mining team. I'm currently part of the Industry Business Unit Mill Products & Mining. And I'm leading the Industry Value Network for Mining, working a lot with partners in the Mining space.

 

Kieran O'Connor: And since you've mentioned it, could you give us an overview of the Industry Value Network or IVN for Mining?

 

Brindusa Radulescu: We started two years ago in one of our Industry Council meetings for Mining when we asked our customers if they would support an initiative from SAP to work with independent software vendor partners in the Mining space. We started with a survey amongst our Council customers to find out which software companies the customers would be interested to work with, together with SAP, to have a full integrated solution in the Mining space.


We evolved from that and came up with five partner companies in different areas: one of the areas is Mine Planning and Scheduling. We also have partners in Enterprise Asset Management and also Compliance. We had a very good start. We had a meeting in March of last year in Heidelberg - our first Partner Day - with members of the Industry Value Network for Mining. We had validation from the customers, and the integration scenarios that we worked on were very well received.

Since then, we further evolved and extensively worked with some of the partners to come up with solutions, such as Runge's Short-Term Mine Scheduling composite application, and we are now preparing for a second phase of the Industry Value Network for Mining, which will include new partners and also system integrators.

 

Kieran O'Connor: Tony, Brindusa just referenced the Short-Term Mine Scheduling application. Can you tell us a little about it and what benefits it provides?

 

Tony Kinnane: The actual composite we developed just over 12 months ago. It was the result of a bit of history, which I should probably go back to, which was an idea that Runge had eight years ago that there's a lot more value to be gained out of correct use of information right through the supply chain in the Mining industry. We were watching as large companies like SAP gradually moved towards building those things.

Eventually, about two years ago we saw it was a good point in time to start demonstrating our skills in this area, because there was a lot of domain knowledge lacking in the Enterprise world about the Mining industry and specifically the spatial data and all the intricacies of an ore body. So, about a-year-and-a-half ago we embarked upon putting our Short-Term Scheduling tool XACT into a composite, which basically allows an engineer to do very short-term scheduling down to minutes and hours if he wants to, but tentatively up to three months if he should so wish. That tool was built in the Dot-NET environment and we thought it would be the best tool to push and pull information out of SAP for use in the scheduling environment.

The benefit of all of this is that typically you can do weekly schedules at a Mining operation and quite often it can take two to three days to gather the information together to actually do the schedule. As you can imagine two to three days in a weekly schedule is a bit ridiculous. It just doesn't work. Being able to pull information from an Enterprise system at a moment's notice and reschedule things very quickly is a fundamental aspect of being able to deliver improved production rates of in a Mining operation. Hence, we went with the quick-win scenario with this particular one, where we put the Short-Term Mine Scheduling solution into the composite. The benefits are quite significant in terms of time, in terms of turnaround, in terms of quality: all those things that we were short of in the industry, as the numbers of people capable of doing this work in the industry are spread thinner and thinner.

 

Kieran O'Connor: How did you actually first get involved with SAP?

 

Tony Kinnane: We had looked at SAP from a distance for quite a few years. We were very big in South Africa from the early ‘90s on with a large company called Sasol and we were there when SAP came into South Africa and started working with Sasol. After a little to-ing and fro-ing, we ended up working alongside SAP, with them watching us and us watching them. So we actually observed each other from a distance to start with.

There was a bit of a learning curve on both sides' part on where we existed. Eventually, other customers around the world - the global Mining players - started to agitate (for want of a better word) that Runge and SAP should probably do more things together, because we complement each other. A lot of the information that Runge generates out of our desktop solutions are needed in the Enterprise environment and they weren't easily transferable. So we were probably almost marriage-brokered into it by a few of the bigger companies. After about two years ago, I'd say, there was a mutual respect there between the two companies: that we had our place in the world and could work together quite well. So that's how we got together: it was a bit of watching and waiting; a bit of seeing how each other worked; and a bit of marriage-brokering by the big Mining houses.

 

Kieran O'Connor: Maybe I can move back to Brindusa. You were talking about the scheduling and planning aspects of the IVN solutions. How does Runge fit within the entire portfolio of IVN for Mining solutions?

 

Brindusa Radulescu: We are very pleased with our successful collaboration with Runge. For the first time, we can offer our customers a solution that covers an end-to-end scenario, starting with the Mine geological model, going into long-term planning, into short-term scheduling, having all the production data fed into SAP, being able to do reporting on production figures and costs. I think it's a good collaboration and it shows the results of efforts from both sides - Runge and SAP. And our customer community has received our collaboration very well.

 

Kieran O'Connor: Could you give us a summary of the future of immediate plans for the IVN for Mining, because I think you had mentioned that the IVN was moving into Phase 2 of its development. What does this {Phase 2} actually mean?

 

Brindusa Radulescu: Phase 2 for the Mining IVN will include one of the areas that was heavily requested by out customers - that's the Fleet Management space. It will include two new partners, two new independent software vendors in this area. We are hoping with this that we are covering most of the white spaces in the Mining solution offering. As well, we are planning to include system integrators in the Mining IVN to help us scale and implement these solutions.

 

Kieran O'Connor: Folks, I'd like to thank you for talking to us today. And we look forward to future innovations for the Mining community from the SAP and Runge collaborations as well as all the other IVN members. Thank you very much Brindusa and thank you Tony.

 

End

  

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