Futuresense

Richards Bay Minerals boosts strategic planning and modelling with Hyperion

Richards Bay Minerals has embarked on an implementation of the Hyperion Strategic Finance application for its value planning and strategic modelling requirements.

Implemented by Futuresense, Hyperion Strategic Finance is a financial modelling application. It will provide realtime information on alternative strategies to corporate development, finance and treasury executives at Richard Bay Minerals (RBM), enabling them to analyse the financial impact of critical business decisions and to choose the strategic path of greatest value to deliver continuous performance improvement.

"Once the implementation is complete, RBM will have the ability to quickly and accurately assess the impact of multiple capital projects and strategies on its cash flows and funding requirements," says Steven Hyslop, director of Futuresense. "It will focus the finance team on building and growing its business, and strategise more effectively, instead of building, maintaining and wading through inflexible and unreliable spreadsheets."

Situated on the Indian Ocean coastline of South Africa, Richards Bay Minerals produces titania slag, high purity pig iron, rutile and zircon. Jointly owned by Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton, the company produces 1,9 million tons of product annually, 95% of which is exported.

Prior to beginning the Hyperion Strategic Finance implementation, the company relied on a cumbersome spreadsheet environment to perform any financial planning, modelling and scenario creation.

"Working strategically with financial data in spreadsheets is a risky endeavour at best, because it is too segregated and inflexible, and lacks formulae integrity," says Andre Redgard, business analyst, decision support at RBM. "Manipulating data takes time and the variety of applications possible with data in spreadsheets is very limiting. The Hyperion Strategic Finance implementation will ensure the easy creation and integration of scenario planning and modelling and improve turnaround times. It will support continuous planning, and will provide much needed drill down capabilities, something we lack in the spreadsheet environment."

Running on the company's existing Windows server infrastructure, Hyperion Strategic Finance will be focused on its capital decision-making, forecasting and budgeting, and strategy formulation areas of activity.

Standard and custom reports

The application generates not only standard reports from the calculated output data but lets users create custom reports. It provides many methods that can be chosen to project values in forecast periods. Users can select pre-defined forecast methods or enter their own freeform formula for forecasting.

"Using Hyperion Strategic Finance, Richards Bay Minerals will be able to create, test and validate driver-based strategies, budgets and plans; and identify paths of maximum value". Furthermore "Richards Bay Minerals will benefit from a better understanding of the impact of different scenarios on its corporate value; funding and financing optimisation; and the optimisation of key accounts."