Runge, an Australian company providing mining software and consulting services globally, today announced it has joined SAP's consortium, which consists of mining companies, technology partners and SAP, to address the industry's needs and business challenges.

The industry value network (IVN) for mining includes representatives from the Industry Advisory Council for Mining such as BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto, Anglo American, Anglo Platinum, Codelco, Exxaro, Foundation Coal, Gold Fields, and Goldcorp. Other key partners include Meridium, Technidata, OSIsoft, Citect, and Gijima AST.

Tony Kinnane, CEO of Runge, said, "Runge is delighted to be working with SAP and its partners to resolve business and operational challenges for the global mining industry. The IVN for mining will collaborate to design and deliver pre-integrated, standard solutions for end-to-end business processes from the mine to the end customer.

"By combining the mining engineer and equipment scheduling process of the maintenance manager, mining IVN partners are working on a truly innovative end-to-end mining scheduling process. In conjunction with leading mining companies, Runge and SAP are developing a unique solution that for the first time will enable an integrated mining scheduling process. This partnership also means Runge now has full SAP integration capability."

The IVN members will be working on new composite solutions and integration scenarios in the areas of mining operations management (for mine planning and scheduling, metallurgical reconciliation and metal accounting), enterprise asset management (for reliable maintenance optimisation, delay accounting and performance optimisation), as well as operational compliance (for emissions management, and health and safety management.