A chat with IFS Champion Jodie Hatch, Chief Technology Officer at Resolute Mining.
Resolute Mining is no stranger to innovation. In fact, its site in Mali will be the first, purpose-built, fully automated sublevel cave gold mine in the world. With a global organization that comprises gold mines in Africa and Queensland and headquarters in Perth, any technological innovation going in must be robust, flexible and backed by a team of experts.
The person tasked with making sure the company stays in the forefront when it comes to next-generation technology is Jodie Hatch. I recently caught up with Jodie to learn more about his work with IFS and to get a better understanding of why he was nominated as a IFS Champion.
What do you do at Resolute Mining?
As Chief Technology Officer, I see myself as the bridge between the business and technology—translating business requirements into solutions. Another important aspect is being an advocate for technology in the business and finding ways for us to leverage our capabilities and technical know-how to deliver value to the business.
What three words best describe you?
Firstly, I think I am outcome-oriented—I like to get things done and not leave any loose ends.
I also like to think that I am a good team player. I enjoy working with teams of motivated people to deliver value.
The third word that comes to mind is strategic. Given my background as a consultant at Accenture, Deloitte and PwC, I like to come up with a strategy and a plan and then work with the team to deliver against that plan.
How do you use IFS to run your business?
We use IFS Applications across two mines located in Mali and in Queensland, as well as at our corporate office in Perth. We are running IFS to cover a very broad range of functional areas, including finance, supply chain, HCM, asset maintenance, project management, health & safety, sub-contracting, mobile work order management, among others.
The solution also has very broad geographic scope, supporting staff based in Mali, Perth, and far-northern Queensland. The solution is intended to be the single source of truth across the entire business, so it has been implemented as one global instance in the cloud to bring the entire business together and digitalize our processes. This gives us confidence in the accuracy of the data and that our business is running efficiently across all sites.
What does being a challenger mean to you?
I think a challenger is someone who has the courage to put forward ideas that are not necessarily aligned with traditional, standard working practices.
One example of this is the collaboration with IFS during the implementation project. We worked with IFS’s Australian team as the primary implementation partner, but we also engaged with the IFS team in France to help facilitate the deployment in Mali, which is a French-speaking nation. This made it possible to deliver training and support to our staff in French, which has made a significant impact on adoption rates.
On a technical level, we have one global instance of IFS Applications hosted in the Microsoft Azure cloud on servers in Sydney. For that set up to be viable in terms of network speed for users in Mali, we leveraged the O3b satellite constellation that gives us fiber latency with satellite coverage. We also set up next-generation firewalls across all of our sites so that we could do software-defined networking. We then used the Microsoft Azure network to route the IFS traffic via the fastest possible link from Mali via satellite to Sydney, giving us a latency that was more than acceptable for the business.
You’re a busy person. Why is it important for you to take time to tell your story? What do you hope others take away from it?
From our perspective, it’s all about shared learnings. We wouldn’t want to engage with an ERP vendor that is making things up on the fly—we want to leverage good practice from a number of different industries and to be able to tap into a network of peers. Equally, I believe that our work with IFS can provide valuable input for companies in any number of industries.
Why do you think you were nominated as a challenger?
I am not quite sure how it came about. I think what really matters is that the projects and the teams keep moving forward to make sure the company stays innovative and agile. If I left tomorrow, I am convinced that someone else would take over the reins and drive the business forward.
Speaking as a representative of the wider team, I would say that we have done some very innovative things with our solution and we are not afraid of trying new ideas to deliver more efficiency and value to the business.
Read more about the IFS Champions program.
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Photo: GettyImages_912928582_guvendemir
