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Metals & Mining Industry Excellence Award Winner - Vale
Technology Category
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Exchange & Integration
Applicable Industries
- Metals
- Mining
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
- Discrete Manufacturing
Services
- System Integration
The Challenge
Vale, a global mining company, was striving to achieve best practices in risk management. The company’s operational risk management team had historically focused primarily on loss recovery, looking at how the cost of assets could be protected through insurance. In 2006, however, Vale’s risk managers saw that they needed to take a broader view by identifying potential events or circumstances that might impede their company from achieving its business objectives, assessing those issues in terms of their likelihood and magnitude, determining preventive or remedial actions, and then monitoring the progress of those actions to completion. The Operational Risk team at Vale recognized that the success of their evolving strategy would depend upon their ability to collect, aggregate and analyze vast quantities of information from across the company so they established a framework for integrated risk management.
About The Customer
Vale is one of the world’s largest mining companies, striving to achieve best practices in risk management. Headquartered in Brazil, Vale is the market leader in the production of iron ore and ranks second in the production of nickel. The company also produces pellets, coal, copper, fertilizers, manganese, and ferroalloys. Vale has around 195,000 employees working in 30 countries on five continents. As a member of the International Council on Mining and Metals (ICMM), Vale is publicly committed to implementing risk management strategies based on valid data and sound science. The company is developing a comprehensive new strategy for Enterprise Risk Management.
The Solution
Vale selected Sphera’s Stature® software as the enterprise-wide foundation for the risk framework. With this new centralized information system, Vale’s Operational Risk team can now identify, analyze, mitigate and monitor enterprise-level risks on a collaborative web-based platform, where lessons learned and best practices can be shared across the business. The system provides data standardization, sharing, version control, security, and the ability to consolidate information into a risk register. As a result, new operational efficiencies were uncovered. The risk framework and Stature play an essential role by consolidating the company’s risk information in one system and actively engaging stakeholders throughout the organization.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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