Abandoning current faulty budgeting process through information technology and systems reengineering

The relatively recent explosion of available data in all business sectors has induced a common expression of 'drowning in data, starving for information'. The mining sector is affected by the information age through equipment based sensors, process monitoring and traditional enterprise data sources. Yet key engineering processes, such as budgeting, which have huge impacts on decision making, use spreadsheets and aggregated averages to compile data into single values. New information technology (IT) such as data warehousing and data mining can first prove the inaccuracies of traditional budgeting techniques. Identifying or disproving long held managerial assumptions can help redirect managerial activities toward more fact based decision making. Information technology can be used to exploit variations in highly detailed data to calculate probabilistic budgets. This research uses three large scale data warehouses from three companies, one underground and two surface, for a total of ten mines and 1-3 terabytes of data.