Case Study
Center of Excellence for a Global Mining & Metals Company
Dynamic Resource Deployment Across Geographies
Industry Context: In recent years, mining companies have boosted output in response to increased industrial demand, resulting in excellent financial performance. This growth has increased pressure to optimize their yield of raw materials while also addressing concerns from stakeholders about health, safety, and environmental impacts.
Challenge: To responsibly create value and optimize its operations at scale, the company relies heavily on subject-matter experts, such as geotechnical engineers, metallurgists, and environmental scientists. These highly-skilled individuals are globally dispersed and can be difficult to find, especially for engagements that require local knowledge, whether geological, cultural, or political.
As a result, company leaders have historically had to rely upon external local contractors, whom they have engaged in an ad hoc, uncoordinated way. This reliance on external consultants has not only been inefficient, but it has also often led to talent shortages that pose significant risks.
Dynamic Deployment of Internal Resources: Business and operations leaders decided to use Catalant’s platform to get visibility into the knowledge, skills, experiences, and capacity of the subject-matter experts within the company’s technical Center of Excellence (COE), a group of nearly 10,000 employees in various mining and industrial disciplines.
Catalant’s platform provided operations leaders with visibility into the knowledge, skills, experiences, and capacity of the subject-matter experts within the Center of Excellence — it gave them an easy way to find and engage specialists across the globe, from Western Australia to Mozambique to Saskatchewan.
Before Catalant, the process for finding and engaging members of the COE lacked formal structure, resulting in slower and less-reliable execution, even for important projects and initiatives. With the Catalant Platform, whether a business unit requires a geologic survey to increase mine productivity or a safety analysis to prevent a ridge collapse, business and operations leaders can access the critical capabilities they need to execute.
Opportunity Access and Employee Engagement: Through Catalant’s platform, members of the technical COE now have access to projects across business units and geographies and visibility into the impact that each workstream has on the organization’s strategic objectives.
Work through the technical COE includes some of the most important and highest visibility projects and initiatives at the company.
By providing subject-matter experts with access to the company’s most critical work and giving them visibility into their strategic impact, the organization inspires COE members with a greater sense of purpose and potential, accelerating execution while also building the company’s next generation of business and scientific leaders.