Greentree unearths exploration and mining potential

When Gallery Gold’s business focus changed from being an exploration company to becoming a gold producer, followed by a company merger, it realised it needed better accounting and business management. Thankfully, flexibility, integration and remote access are the cornerstones of the Greentree business management solution making it a competitive choice for the mining industry...

Gallery Gold Limited is a publicly listed mining and exploration company with a head office in Perth and field offices in Botswana and Tanzania. It acquired highly prospective Tanzanian tenements in a merger with junior explorer Spinifex Gold Limited in October 2003, commenced gold production at its Mupane project in Botswana in November 2004, and has a number of exploration programs for gold, nickel, platinum, copper and diamonds.

Fully integrated
Following the acquisition Stephen Hills, Chief Financial Officer, chose Greentree to replace their disparate systems in Australia and Africa.

“We wanted a single accounting platform.

As our business develops, we require more accountability. With Greentree, we have a fully integrated system that handles our multiple foreign currencies and consolidation requirements and also provides a strong maintenance system.”

Following a review they concluded that there were no specific packages for their mining requirements, so instead they looked closely at three packages some of which were used by mining companies. “We heard of Greentree through ‘word of mouth’ from a colleague in the mining industry. Greentree appealed as a more modern and flexible system than the opposition.

With Greentree, we are able to use the existing modules and tailor them to our processes.

There is not a huge amount of customisation required; we are able to use the modules to fit our purpose. We have the capacity and functionality in Greentree to run our business effectively.”

Stephen continues, “Unlike some products we looked at, we know that if we need to add new companies or structures to our business, or even recreate the chart of accounts, Greentree will be flexible enough to allow us to do so.”

Proven industry experience
The Greentree Business Partner has provided Gallery Gold with a modern, robust business management solution. The team has extensive international mining experience and the Managing Director has played a significant role in the development of large scale mining, and oil & gas projects in the Artic, Western Siberia, and Africa where local technical support and knowledge was often non-existent. Acknowledging the fact, Stephen says, “We have received a good level of support from the business partner. It is a bonus that they have direct mining experience as they really understand our gold mining operation.”

The implementation timeframe was driven by Gallery Gold’s existing projects. For its Botswana exploration program Gallery Gold expanded the locally-based workforce by recruiting and training up to 350 employees for the Mupane project. The Greentree support team enabled them to manage the new staff and training with a staged roll-out. “The implementation was pretty smooth, especially as we had to move all our data from many different systems into Greentree. All the budgets and data were easily brought across using an Excel import. It worked well.” He continues, “We are not fully utilising the system yet, but our teams in Australia and Botswana were able to access Greentree from day one to get at the information.”

Remote control
Greentree is completely on-line with a single point of data entry updating all relevant areas instantaneously. “The beauty of running everything off one system is that we can all look at it at any one time, whether we are in Australia or Africa, and have live access to the information we need.”

Remote users can easily connect to Greentree via a local area network, dialup line, Intranet or over the Internet, providing cost-effective on-line access.

Stephen continues, “The remoteness of Gallery’s offices had the most impact on the roll-out but the remote support works well. The team can solve any issues that arise remotely, which means limited disruption to the day to day business.”

A multi-company consolidation and job maintenance for their international mining activities were prerequisites. The unique “Transaction Tree” feature of Greentree provides excellent analysis capabilities for the complex statutory and management reporting needs of mining and exploration companies, where a single system needs to report on areas from exploration tenement tracking, mining/processing department analysis, through to complex multicurrency, multi-company and multinational situations.

Multi currency handling
“It’s vital to have the ability to handle different currencies with Greentree’s multi-currency functions. The others we looked at were not integrated and some were just stand alone in the maintenance area. We wanted one product that was fully integrated, Greentree provides this.” Stephen continues, “It is hard to pin-point all the key areas of Greentree. We just like the overall functionality it provides.

Our team feel it is very intuitive, easy to use and they like the look of the screens. As we recruit, Greentree is easy for our new people to become involved with.”

Paving the way for growth
The Mupane project, the Gallery-Spinifex merger and Greentree have all paved the way for potential growth of Gallery Gold into a significant African mineral producer.

“Greentree has enabled us to meet our expansion goals as gold producers. It’s met all our current accounting requirements, and we are equipped to handle our future.

Now it’s just a case of getting the most from it.” Stephen concludes, “Greentree gives us a flexible system now, but also it has the ability to grow with our requirements. The structure of our business will continue to evolve and change and Greentree is capable of adapting to these needs.”

> Greentree International
Graham Hill
P: 1800 000 737
F: 1800 090 487
E: graham.hill@greentree.com
W: www.greentree.com

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