AngloGold Ashanti selects Fujitsu for SAP migration

AngloGold Ashanti has struck a five-year deal with Fujitsu to host and manage its SAP ERP system

Gold mining company AngloGold Ashanti has struck a five-year deal with Fujitsu to host and manage its SAP enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.

The deal is part of its broader OneERP plan to migrate from some 30 different ERP systems around the world over to a single instance of SAP in a project that is being led by Accenture.

Part of the Anglo American mining conglomerate, AngloGold has grown following a number of acquisitions across the world and has prospered in recent years as the value of gold has rocketed.

The company has planned its OneERP strategy since 2009. It arose out of Project One, a business process improvement project intended to coordinate business processes across the company. This had been hampered by the many different ERP systems that AngloGold currently runs.

In some regions, says AngloGold Ashanti CIO Andrew Crocker, staff store key corporate data on Microsoft Access databases and spreadsheets. The project will also, therefore, improve data communications to some of the remote mining sites that the company operates, particularly in Africa and South America.

Prior to the rollout, SAP was only run in the company's Australian operations, but the company decided to consolidate on SAP due to the breadth of applications it offers.

Modules being implemented include finance, maintenance, materials management, business intelligance and the HR modules organisation management, personnel administration, talent management and payroll.

The Fujitsu-hosted SAP ERP will be tested from August to December before being rolled out in phases across the company's different sites from February 2013. The project is expected to be completed by the second quarter of 2014.

The value of the Fujitsu deal was not disclosed.