Mining Company

The Background
One of Australia’s premier mining companies operated a number of major mining operations in Western Australia. In the mid 1990’s, each of the Company’s nine Western Australian mining operations ran its own separate payroll, HR and administrative functions.

The Challenge
The mining company was facing increasing cost pressures and needed to find ways to rationalise its administrative functions, reducing administrative costs and unnecessary duplication across business units, better coordinate its human resources, administration and payroll functions across its nine Western Australian based mining operations. The major challenge was to encourage employees and managers in administrative functions at various mine sites to ‘buy in’ to the concept of sharing services and coordinating functions at a State level, even when it meant redundancies in their own departments. Employees and managers who’d spent years in a corporate culture, which gave great independence and authority to each mine site administration department, were now being asked to relinquish some of that independence and authority for the greater good of the company.

The Process
Icecap Consulting identified the provision of ‘shared services’ as the key to reducing duplication and improve organisational efficiencies. Each of the nine separate sites was required to coordinate their recruitment, payroll and HR functions through a centralised state services centre. By coordinating all these services through a single centre, the Company was able to reduce duplication of staff, recruitment advertising, payroll systems and better manage the process of retaining key staff and employing new staff. The process also involved identifying key staff to manage the coordination of services at each site, training them to use the new model and motivating them to adapt to the new system by giving them a sense of ownership. Where duplication of services and functions were identified, positions and roles were rationalised and costs were reduced. Critical to the success of the shared services concept was employee communication and a willingness to engage with and listen to employees, and work with management to overcome employee resistance to change.

The Solution
The ‘shared services’ concept introduced by Icecap Consulting to this major mining company was a radical concept at the time, and a significant departure from the way things had traditionally been done in the Australian mining industry. The ‘shared services’ concept is now the standard model for the coordination of administrative and HR functions at all major mining operations throughout Australia.