The Challenge
A leading nickel mining company operating four sites across Sulawesi had grown rapidly through a combination of organic expansion and acquisition. Each site had developed its own operational systems, reporting processes, and maintenance routines. By 2023, the company was producing significant tonnage across all four sites — but management had no unified view of what that tonnage was actually costing them.
Cost per ton — the company's primary profitability metric — was calculated monthly by the finance team from data manually compiled across four site-level spreadsheets, two accounting systems inherited from acquisitions, and a separate asset register maintained by the operations team. The process took 21 days from month-end to produce a reliable number. By the time management received it, 21 additional days of production had passed under the same conditions.
The CFO described the situation directly: "We were making operational decisions based on estimates we knew weren't accurate, because we didn't have anything better. When we finally got the actual numbers, it was too late to change what had already happened."
Three specific pain points drove the decision to seek a structural solution:
- Asset maintenance was entirely reactive — breakdowns happened without warning, driving unplanned repair costs and lost production time
- Procurement across the four sites was fragmented — each site managed its own vendor relationships, creating spend that was impossible to consolidate or audit
- The finance team was spending 60% of its capacity on data reconciliation rather than analysis or governance
The Approach
Pratesis began with a structured operational assessment across all four sites — mapping data flows, identifying integration gaps, and establishing a baseline measurement of current cost per ton visibility latency. The assessment took four weeks and produced a blueprint that the executive team reviewed and approved before implementation began.
The implementation followed a four-phase approach over 14 months:
The Outcomes
Fourteen months after the initial assessment, the company was operating with a genuinely integrated operational control system. The results were measurable and auditable:
Beyond the metrics, the CFO described a qualitative shift that the numbers don't fully capture: the finance team now spends 70% of its time on analysis, forecasting, and governance — compared to 60% on reconciliation before. The COO described knowing, for the first time, which of the four sites was the most efficient operator — and why.
What This Means for Similar Operations
The pattern this company experienced — fragmented systems producing fragmented visibility — is not unusual in mining enterprises that have grown through acquisition or rapid expansion. The specific systems vary; the structural problem is consistent.
What this engagement demonstrated is that the solution is not primarily a technology problem. The technology exists. The challenge is the governance architecture — ensuring that every operational transaction, from a maintenance work order to a purchase receipt, flows into the same system, consistently, without manual intervention.
That requires three things working together: the right platform configured for mining-specific processes (not a generic ERP), a disciplined implementation that establishes clean data from day one, and a people programme that builds the organisational habit of operating with data rather than around it.
If you are operating a mining enterprise with similar characteristics — multiple sites, fragmented reporting, reactive maintenance, or constrained finance capacity — we'd encourage you to start with a conversation about your specific situation before assuming the solution you need.