SAP Drives Collaboration and Co-Innovation in the Mining Industry

Vienna, Austria .- Continuing to drive community-based innovation and support ecosystem collaboration, SAP AG (NYSE: SAP) today announced the industry value network (IVN) for Mining. Building on the success of the IVN model launched in 2006, customers, partners and SAP will work together to address priority mining industry needs and business challenges. The announcement was made at SAPPHIRE® ’07, SAP’s international customer conference, being held in Vienna, Austria, May 14-16.

To support the high demand for raw materials driven by the current industry boom, mining companies are increasingly focused on supply chain and operations optimization. Through close collaboration with customers that lead SAP’s Industry Advisory Council for Mining, SAP has delivered new solution offerings to support industry challenges including bulk transportation and commodity contract and pricing management. Now, these customers are working with SAP to help build the IVN for mining by bringing together leading partners in the mining industry to design and deliver pre-integrated standard solutions for end-to-end business processes in the mining industry—from the mine to the end customer.

The industry value network for mining includes leading industry customers represented in the Industry Advisory Council for Mining, such as BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto, Anglo American, Exxaro and Goldcorp, as well as key, innovative partners in the mining industry, including Citect, Gijima AST,Meridium, OSIsoft, Runge and Technidata.

Together the IVN members will be working on new composite solutions and integration scenarios in areas such as mining operations management to address mine planning and scheduling; metallurgical reconciliation and metal accounting; enterprise asset management to address reliability-centered maintenance optimization; delay accounting and performance optimization; and operational compliance to address emissions management and health and safety management.

“The members of the Industry Advisory Council for Mining see SAP’s IVN initiative as a key driver to bring the industry’s leading IT vendors in the mining operations space together,” said Peter McLure, current Chairman of the SAP Industry Advisory Council for Mining and Group Manager Enterprise IT Strategy for BHP Billiton. “Solving our business challenges in this area requires a collaborative, multi-vendor effort. We are pleased to see SAP taking the lead to build and drive this mining ecosystem network. We see the IVN as an ongoing journey that will help us leverage our existing investments and create additional business value.”

SAP, partners and customers will work to deliver new solutions addressing a number of business needs. Already identified are solutions that address scheduling and compliance topics.

By combining the scheduling process of the mining engineer and the equipment scheduling process of the maintenance manager, mining IVN partners are working on a truly innovative end-to-end mining scheduling process. Runge, SAP and leading mining companies are co-innovating a unique solution that will enable—for the first time ever—an adaptive mining scheduling process.

With the introduction of new regulations like the Sarbanes-Oxley act, risk management and compliance are becoming an increasingly important focus topic for mining companies. Mining companies worldwide are under pressure to set up strong corporate governance also with respect to metal accounting within their mineral processing operations. To address this need, the IVN is bringing together leading mining customers, OSIsoft and SAP to deliver a new solution for metallurgical reconciliation and metal accounting. By combining the technical view of mass balance and reconciliation of the process engineers with the accounting and valuation view of the corporate controllers, IVN members are working on a truly innovative, end-to-end business process solution to help customers support more accurate reporting and compliance.

Established for diverse industries from banking, to chemicals, to retail, IVNs bring together SAP, partners and industry leaders to solve the most pressing business challenges through the creation and continual improvement of end-to-end business processes. For more information on IVNs, please visit www.sap.com/platform/ecosystem/ivn/.

SAP offers an industry-specific solution portfolio for the mining industry—please see www.sap.com/industries/mining/ for more details.