Aussie dollar climbing… is the iron ore trade back on?
Simandou, one of the world’s most significant iron ore developments, is set to challenge the Pilbara’s dominance soon.
Rio Tinto has signed a $100 million, 10-year outsourcing deal with tech giant IBM that will eventually terminate an estimated 800 finance, procurement, IT and HR positions.
A Rio spokesman said the cuts would help to reduce costs and improve productivity:
“Our core business is mining and it makes sense to partner with other companies for back office and transactional work.”
“We are working with our partners to find opportunities to reduce our costs in support functions like HR, finance, IT and procurement across Rio Tinto’s global operations.”
Rio is also an industry leader in automation of trucks and trains and has plans worth $518 million for the “world’s first, fully automated, long-distance and heavy-haul rail system operating in 2015.”
“[Automation] is going to provide a healthy return on investment for Rio,” said Adrian Wood of Macquarie Group Ltd. “They’re trying to squeeze out those extra few tons a year by automating.”
3 Comments
frankinca
Shifting jobs I can buy, but eliminating workers with robotic machines is for only dangerous work areas where rock fall or similar situations would provide too much danger to a human doing that job. The railroad effort is in my mind a waste of money. The human element on all activity not only provides movement, but surveillance of impending dangers, and decision making aspects that a robotic system can’t hope to match. Humans have an all around use/ability that machines can never match. Machines in a fixed environmental area have great efficiencies I admit, but there are so many built-in restrictions to new ideas and uses because the whole idea is stay the same over and over again.
Ted
Rio might want to be very careful about out sourcing their IT and other functions… Newmont tried to do this same thing and found that the costs spiraled much higher than they had anticipated… the mining business and technology changed so fast that Newmont had to constantly ask for extra work to be done that was not covered under the contract… and thus the costs increasing at a much higher rate than expected. Newmont learned that in-sourcing saved them a great amount of money and effort.
Carla Frett
When ever we talk of productivity, timing matters a lot in each small case. The more precised matter for productivity rise can be better gained with the proper time tracking of the workers involved in the work place. Industry approach for the timing factor needs to be tracked with the help of certain softwares or tools that can be of a better need to any of the time management aspects.
In fact the BYOD policy as well seeks importance in the productivity in the industry. All which I am writing is being mentioned by one of the blog post that I came across recently while looking out for the some good tools for productivity improvement. Can’t wait sharing the same with you people. Check out the link here – http://www.replicon.com/blog/how-byod-policies-can-help-cut-time-tracking-costs-and-improve-productivity