Thank you,for helping to change the Mining Industry...

MineRP first came up with the concept to bring the "science of mining" to the "business of mining" in 2009, when we discussed with clients an idea to represent Resource and Reserves as stock in a company's ERP, which, till today, is not done.

We accelerated this thinking over the last 3 years, culminating in 2 patent applications, GeoInventory, the other GeoFinance, which describes aligning the work breakdown structures between the two domains. These ideas met with great enthusiasm in the industry and clients. MineRP is in the process of taking these two solutions to market. This year, we saw SAP coming on board with this vision, as augments their strategic roadmap to Digitally Transform all enterprises.

Today, most businesses close for summer holidays in South Africa. I sat down to think who we have to thank for the major progress we have made with SAP over the last 4 months. We jointly shaped the use cases for clients, took a deep look at which solutions & technologies will be required on both sides, and kicked off a process in MineRP to build components required to industrialise #GeoInv and #GeoFin, with the assistance of the SAP Co-Innovation laboratory (COIL). The 24 faces shown are those in MineRP and SAP that interacted extensively to understand the joint dream. Many more people contributed, including several clients.

MineRP John Megannon, Andries Loubser, Mike Woodhall, Johnny vd Berg, Empie Strydom and Pieter Nel for leadership on how "science to business" will change mining.

SAP Rudi de Louw, who saw what HANA could do for this use case in 2013 and kept pushing, Simon Carpenter, Georg Gradl for executive leadership. Freek Malherbe, Lorna Cook, Deon Cilliers, Ansophie Strydom on how to navigate the organisation SAP. Estelle de Beer and Lindo Smith for understanding our value proposition quickly, and guiding which solution consultants should guide us. Nishan Naiker on how to integrate solutions to SAP, Roger Loe on HANA as a platform, Johan Reynders, Gregg Taylor, Charles de Jager on HANA. Peter Blignaut on SAP MDG, Paul Vermaak on SAP Predictive Analytics, Francois Beyleveld on SAP Enterprise Performance Management. Marvin Perumal on partnering as OEM partner, Morteza Safai on SAP partner models.

Shabir Ahmed on guidance of mining in SAP and Value Engineering, Greg Nethercote on assisting with use cases and clients, Alvin Paules on architecture and use cases. Frank Ruland and Georg Gradl on navigating SAP world-wide. Elke Simon-Keller and HaJo Odlozinski on innovation in SAP.

Others are not shown in the photos, Zane Brooks and others from MineRP for building concepts and demos. From SAP, Brett Parker, and Pfungwa Serima for strategic guidance, Miliau Pape and Wolgang Weinmann from COIL for the on-site visit, and much more support on the solutions-part moving forward.

Thank you. I am looking forward to 2016, and how we will look back at the end of 2016, and see how we made a difference to mining, which sits at the heart of all economic activity for the citizens of the world.