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Asset management consulting services offered

15th November 2013

By: David Oliveira

Creamer Media Staff Writer

  

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The African branch of strategic asset management consulting company GMC Global, which is part of SMEC Group, opened in May this year and is actively engaging with a number of clients, GMC Global Africa regional manager Schalk Prinsloo tells Engineering News.

The global company has completed several projects worldwide and for companies operating in Africa, including diamond mining giant De Beers, global resources company BHP Billiton and gold mining company Newmont Ghana, he notes.

GMC Global intends to develop its Africa office by segmenting its market operations into those markets that are most promising and profitable. The company has identified the mining, oil and gas, manufacturing, metals and petrochemicals industries as potential growth areas for GMC Global in Africa.

The company also has a customer relationship management tool that helps it generate leads worldwide. The leads have grown since the company attended the nineteenth yearly Mining Indaba, in February, which offered the company a great opportunity to network with mining companies and industry leaders. GMC Global will be at the 2014 Mining Indaba, together with its parent company, SMEC.

The company provides strategic services in three areas – maintenance, supply chain and reliability management.

“Maintenance management involves several functions, such as a company’s maintenance strategy, how the company operates around this strategy and whether a company implements the strat- egy properly. GMC Global assesses a company and highlights the functions that a company is not executing well and highlights areas for improvement using best practice and our global experience,” says Prinsloo.

GMC Global implements maintenance management strategies on all the equipment on a mine’s asset register, which could include the entire mining plant, conveyor systems, drills and mobile equipment, such as trucks and excavators, explains Prinsloo.

When facilitating maintenance management strategies, the company provides customers with an assessment to determine a base- line. This assessment entails reviewing all areas of a company, such as its strategic objectives, maintenance implementation, life-cycle costing for equipment and the way in which the supply chain operates and integrates with maintenance.

Once a baseline has been established, GMC Global will provide a series of recommendations and strategies for the company to achieve effective maintenance and supply chain management.

“In South Africa, capturing equipment maintenance information and registering assets on enterprise resource planning systems, as well as the feedback from these systems, are problematic. “Many companies do capture this information correctly, but many do not, which impacts on the total life-cycle costing of equipment,” says Prinsloo.

Supply chain management involves the evaluation of the supply chain strategy, looking at the optimum stock levels and bills of materials, getting all the spares and original-equipment-manufacturer supplies to site using just-in-time supply strategies to limit capital being tied up in inventory, where possible and practical.

The same processes for determining a baseline apply to supply chain management strategies, and once a company is proficient in the areas of maintenance and supply chain management, it moves on to the reliability management area, which helps companies to better manage their maintainability, availability and reliability, and, as a result, costs. “Few companies are moving towards reliability, as they continue to struggle with maintenance and supply chain management,” he comments.

The global economy and the political climate in Africa present challenges for GMC Global, as companies will only invest in new mining projects on the continent if there is political stability, says Prinsloo.

“Everything comes down to cost effectiveness, especially because of the current economic downturn and China’s decreased demand. There will be an upward trend in the cycle again and GMC Global is trying to prepare companies to be more cost effective when this occurs.

“Lack of infrastructure is another challenge. Companies are interested in developing new projects in Africa, but insufficient infrastructure in certain countries hampers the transport of raw materials to port for export and of supplies and maintenance equipment to site. Lead times need to be taken into consideration for the supply chain, as long lead times impact on equipment downtime, which, in turn, impacts on profitability,” he explains.

GMC Global also trains key mining personnel on the implementation of maintenance and supply chain strategies as well as reliability programmes.

He notes that companies in Africa are importing skills from abroad to meet the skills shortage. Chinese, Canadian, Australian and South African nationals often comprise the skilled labour workforce.

“African countries are starting to enrol their employees in training programmes, which is a requirement of mining companies operating in Africa to address the skills shortage and facilitate skills transfer,” Prinsloo says, adding that GMC Global can help companies in all these areas.

Edited by Tracy Hancock
Creamer Media Contributing Editor

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