What is Integrated Strategic Planning? In this 13-minute video, Gerald Whittle, CEO of Whittle Consulting, explains how Whittle Integrated Strategic Planning provides a fully integrated approach to the planning and operation of mining businesses. Due to international interest, this video has recently been upgraded to include sub-titled translations in Spanish, Portuguese and Indonesian.
Mining is complicated
There is no one person who understands, at a detailed technical level, how a modern-day mining operation works. This means that mining businesses often work in organisational silos. Whittle Consulting understands that this siloed approach to the business of mining can never allow mining operations to perform to their optimum potential. The answer is to implement Whittle Integrated Strategic Planning.
What is Whittle Integrated Strategic Planning?
Whittle Integrated Strategic Planning is a fully integrated approach to the business of mining. It involves cross-functional collaboration; simultaneously considering all parts of the value chain - including all time periods and stakeholders. The objective is to build a single, integrated model of the mining system, as a whole.
The Whittle Enterprise Optimisation model
The Whittle approach applies management concepts, including Activity Based Costing (ABC) and Theory of Constraints (TOC). State of the art optimisation methodology and sophisticated, proprietary Whittle software (Prober-E) are also applied within the Whittle Enterprise Optimisation model.
The Whittle Enterprise Optimisation model that is developed is individually tailored for each mine site. It determines how much capital is worth spending in each constraint. It simultaneously rebalances the pit, phase, schedule, cut-off, blending, stockpile, processing, product mix, logistics, capital scaling and considers sustainability. It is a fully integrated approach to planning a mining project or operation.
The benefits of a Whittle Enterprise Optimisation
A Whittle Enterprise Optimisation rewrites the life-of-mine plan, on a dollars per bottleneck unit. This can have a profound effect on profitability. The total cash flow of the mine is increased, and/or bringing the cash flow forward. This in turn significantly improves Net Present Value (NPV). The Whittle Integrated Strategic Planning video details how over the past 2 decades, Whittle Consulting has improved the economics of many mining businesses by 5%-35%, and often substantially more. Importantly, these results have been achieved, even after traditional optimisation techniques have already been applied. These results are regularly achieved on both open pit and underground mining operations, across all commodities and are undertaken across all continents around the world.