What is the true cost to your business of operating without reliable..
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Welcome to episode one of the Ramesses Global podcast. My name is Luke Wonky and joining me here today is Ramesses Global managing director, John Goodman. John is a card account with over 30 years' experience as an accountant and cost management consultant to the mining and resources industries and has worked with the who's who of mining CEOS and CFOS, not just here in Australia but around the world. Welcome John. Thanks, great to be here, John. We were talking earlier off air about how many mining companies out there really struggle with the time taken to deliver cost reporting at end of month. Why is that you think? Um look great question Luke. Um And really this is one of the biggest issues that we find facing many of our clients. Um Biggest problem is so many organizations are relying on Excel to get reporting out, which means it's a it's a cut and paste process at the end of month there, they taken data out of their dumps out of their trial balance for their for their actual information and they're having to go and find their Excel spreadsheets for budgets and cut and paste this and then um reconciliation process fixing up all the charting and the reporting and so on. Um It's often well into the second week of the new month before before a lot of clients are getting reporting out to their management teams. There must be a lot of frustration, John cause not only within the finance department, within the company as a whole, what what are the implications of the slowing end of month reporting? Well, look, firstly, it's just a lot of wasted time for the, for the accountants and business analysts, the preparation time, the frustration of having to do a lot of almost meaningless work to get the forget the reports up. Um and a lot of checking and balancing and so on. Um So time, waste frustration. Um I guess the second probably important thing is the value of data is, is the timeliness of it. So, you know, most executive teams want to be analyzing the performance within the first few days of the month end because that's when it's meaningful to them, that's, that's, that's what they've done in the last month. They want to understand that and analyze it there. And I guess thirdly, it's also a little bit about the, the team, the management team having confidence in the data that's coming out. And as you, as you can understand with the complexity of cutting and pasting Excel things together, um There's not always that confidence in. So lack of confidence in the data timeliness is not there, which is obviously key with making informed and timely business decisions, what other issues? Just slow end of month reporting calls. Um Look, look, I guess um um really critical to users is what's the value of the data that they're getting and, and to be able to get meaningful analysis, they need to be able to drill into the data. So the problem with, with, with, with the standard approaches, it's really hard to actually get behind the face numbers and see, see what's really going on. And so therefore getting to root cause analysis, not something that's a that that easily falls out of the out of the monthly reporting process. Yes, a really limited drill down when it comes to Excel end of month reporting. I mean, does it really need to be this way, John, there's got to be a better way. Um Look great question and here's, here's the crux of it reporting used to be really hard. Uh but things have changed so much. We're delivering Microsoft Power BI I based solutions to our clients. Um We're delivering them very cost effectively, they're cheap, they're very quick to stand up. Um And basically reporting is dropping out as soon as the month end is closed, which means operations management can be reviewing reports with, with, with senior management within days of the of the month end. Um And because of the amount of information that's contained within these, within these reports, powerful drill throughs become seriously meaningful tools for actually analyzing performance improvement opportunities. That's what report, that's what data should be for is actually how do I do my business better? Yeah. Right. I mean, this seems really like a quantum change when it comes to the way mining companies use their data is that fair to say, oh look, look for years, management and finance teams that have looked for smarter ways to do reporting. But the problem is tools have always been expensive and incredibly complex. Well, seriously technologies caught up putting powerful dashboard reports on every key users desk is now Not just affordable, but it's a it's a, it's a quick and easy process. We're delivering this to to our clients in a matter of 4-6 weeks. So we're transforming their reporting journey in that in that amount of time. Um We're finding many clients now are doing the monthly review live, the 50 page mail out report packs um gone, it's becoming redundant. All of that information is now available through simple online dashboards. So really the finance team role is changing from having this process of manipulating large chunks of data into Excel reporting. Now they're becoming the people that actually their role is to help their, their users understand and analyze their costs and very often in a live environment. Yeah. So now a lot of the data reporting is actually being pushed out to the field to the to the to the to the owners of the data. Is that fair to say John? Absolutely. That's that's the outcome and they're the people that need to understand what their, what their actions have delivered in terms of cost performance. So that's where it should be. Thanks very much John. I hope everyone enjoyed this episode of Aromas is global podcast ramses global's goals to make it easier for mining companies to achieve a transparent understanding of their cost performance, develop a cost conscious culture and create a single source of truth that helps leadership make better decisions faster.