Thiess Mining, Operator of One of the World's Largest Mining Fleets, Deploys Adaptive Discovery to Gain Enterprise Scale Analytics

PALO ALTO, CA--(Marketwired - Oct 21, 2013) - Adaptive Planning, the worldwide leader in cloud-based business analytics solutions for companies and nonprofits of all sizes, today announced that Thiess, one of the world's largest open-cut mining contractors, has implemented Adaptive Planning's visual analytics and data visualization solution, Adaptive Discovery, to improve operational metrics and business performance.

With projects across Australia, 3,000 employees in Mining Services and a $2 billion plant and equipment fleet, Thiess is one of the world's largest open-cut contract miners, responsible for the production of more than a hundred million tons of coal, copper, gold and iron ore each year. Each day, Thiess collects vast amounts of information about its operations. The company's mining operations run 24 hours a day and each truck is equipped with over 300 sensors. Everything from the amount of diesel fuel used by trucks to the volume of coal and minerals extracted is collated and stored.

"We collect information on every person, machine, activity, location, delay, and consumable in the business," says Ben Willey, Manager of Mining and Technology Innovation at Thiess. "We are a process control organization. We deliver value to our clients through optimizing resources and processes, so measuring Key Performance Indicators is critical to our business performance. Our competitive advantage comes from how well we make data-driven decisions and we needed to be utilizing a technology that better enabled us to do this."

As analytics are clearly core to their business, the traditional solutions were no longer a viable option for Thiess. The company needed business analytics solution that could complement their data warehouse, and be available across all locations and in the hands of employees from the office to the mining locations. The organization needed a solution that could give them near instantaneous access to vast amounts of business data. Thiess made the decision to implement Adaptive Discovery across multiple locations to provide the deep, scalable insight on demand required by its growing organization. The fact that Adaptive Discovery is a cloud-based system made it particularly appealing.

Adaptive Discovery was implemented within a few months, and Thiess quickly integrated data collected in the field, rolling out real-time insight and data visualization for all stakeholders. Success became evident as soon as the new system went live. In the first week, information gathered from the company's fleet of trucks identified a mechanical problem that could have significantly slowed production. With Adaptive, Thiess' personnel can now access 40 different metrics derived from millions records to obtain answers in seconds.

"The Adaptive Discovery implementation essentially paid for itself by immediately notifying us of a problem where in the past the root cause analysis would have taken more time to identify. You know you have a winning solution when it earns its stripes the day you switch it on," says Willey. "Adaptive Discovery's capacity to conduct millions of calculations, obtain trends and then display the information as key performance indicators that are contextual and timely is a powerful advantage. We have the latest data available just after each shift has closed. Thiess now has the analytics required to ensure we can continue to grow and serve our customers in the future."

With operations spread across Australia, Thiess staff members spend considerable time in the field and at mining locations. Adaptive Discovery puts analytics and performance indicators in the palm of their hands through its native iPhone application. With Discovery in place, Thiess is well placed to ensure its operations continue to become increasingly efficient and productive. With the industry in a constant state of change, maintaining close watch on every facet of the business is critical for success.

Thiess' selection of Adaptive Planning enabled the company to see ROI in the first week of deployment. Unlike traditional tools like SAP BusinessObjects, Oracle Hyperion, Tableau, QlikTech, etc., Adaptive Discovery is completely designed for the cloud and only the cloud. The use of Adaptive Discovery and its cloud based solution allowed Thiess to:

• Provide mobile analytics to every location using Adaptive Discovery's native iPhone application
• Scale elastically across 25+ locations
• Get near instantaneous query performance across millions of rows of data
• Dramatically reduced the need for IT to care and feed analytics

"We are happy to help Thiess improve their operational metrics by providing a pain free way to create analytical dashboards, add and manipulate data as well as drill down into specific data points on demand with our Adaptive Discovery solution," said John Herr, CEO of Adaptive Planning. "As Thiess continues to grow, we are pleased to enable better management of business intelligence and analytics."

Click to Tweet: @thiessausmining Achieves #ROI in Weeks with @AdaptivePlans #BI #CFO #SaaS http://bit.ly/15Vxy8v

About Thiess Mining
With an annual turnover of $6.5 billion and 20,000 employees, Thiess is Australia's leading and most trusted construction, mining and services contractor, and a wholly owned subsidiary of Leighton Holdings Limited.

About Adaptive Planning
Adaptive Planning is the worldwide leader in cloud-based business analytics solutions for companies and nonprofits of all sizes. The company's software as a service (SaaS) platform allows finance and management teams to work together to plan, monitor, report on, and analyze financial and operational performance. With capabilities for budgeting, forecasting, reporting, consolidation, dashboards, and business intelligence, Adaptive Planning enables finance, sales, and other business leaders to make better, faster, more collaborative decisions that drive a true competitive advantage.

Adaptive Planning is used by over 1,800 organizations worldwide, from midsized companies and nonprofits to large corporations, including AAA, Boston Scientific, CORT, Konica Minolta, NetSuite, Philips, and Vail Resorts. The company is the 5th fastest growing software company in Silicon Valley on the Deloitte Technology Fast 500™ list; has the #1 brand in midmarket CPM; and ranks #1 in customer satisfaction in independent industry surveys. With customers and partners in over 85 countries worldwide, the company has the strongest channel ecosystem in the cloud CPM space, with worldwide partners including Armanino, Intacct, IntuitiveTek, Plex Systems, SAP, and NetSuite, which offers a specialized version of Adaptive Planning as the NetSuite Financial Planning Module. Adaptive Planning is headquartered in Palo Alto, Calif. and is funded by Bessemer Venture Partners (BVP), Norwest Venture Partners (NVP), Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), ONSET Ventures, Monitor Ventures, and Cardinal Venture Capital.