Microsoft Customer Story: Rio Tinto Mines New Frontiers of Efficiency and Agility in the Cloud

11/13/2020 Microsoft Customer Story-Rio Tinto mines new frontiers of efficiency and agility in the cloud

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Industry Energy For 144 years, Rio Tinto has pioneered automated innovation in Organization Size mining. But because its business faces constant pressure from Corporate (10,000+ employees) gyrating commodities prices, Rio Tinto relentlessly seeks new Country efficiencies. The company moved its huge SAP estate to Microsoft Australia Azure and is digitally empowering its 55,000 employees with highly secure mobile access to business information through Microsoft 365 Enterprise. With these cloud advances, Rio Tinto is Share this story moving faster, saving money, improving decisions, and better

engaging employees.

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“ With SAP running in Azure, we can deploy needed infrastructure faster and thus respond faster to pricing volatility in commodities, exchange rate fluctuations, and business needs. ”

—Steve Somerville: Head of Enterprise IT Services —Rio Tinto

View video: https://play.vidyard.com/4w6QtySotVuw3vubvHCnvx.jpg

People have been digging minerals and metal out of the ground since prehistoric times. But mining has changed significantly since the days when dirt-streaked workers crawled through dark, creaky tunnels. Undoubtedly, mining is still a hazardous business. But technology has transformed one of the world’s dirtiest and most dangerous jobs into a highly automated profession. Smart drill bits bore miles beneath the earth’s surface, controlled by engineers in high-rise office buildings thousands of miles away. Autonomous trains ferry iron ore from mine sites to shipping terminals, similarly piloted by remote engineers.

Find the next efficiency opportunity

Rio Tinto, one of the world’s largest metals and mining corporations, has played a key role in these and other technological transformations. Founded in 1873 with the purchase of a copper and silver mine on the Rio Tinto in Huelva, Spain, the company has grown through a long series of mergers and acquisitions to become a global leader in the production of many commodities, including aluminum, iron ore, copper, uranium, coal, and diamonds. The company operates in 40 countries on six continents, including some of the most remote, difficult terrains and climates in the world.

The extensive automation in mining has dramatically improved worker safety while also reducing environmental degradation and costs. But Rio Tinto is under constant threat from fluctuating global economic conditions—including not only commodities pricing but also global currency exchange rates, government © 2017 Microsoft

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regulations, and political conditions. These create volatility in the commodities market and significantly influence the price and demand for the company’s products.

In 2012, Rio Tinto realized that it needed to reduce operating costs and increase cash flow to give the business the freedom to act on new opportunities and pivot quickly. It set an ambitious target to recoup USD5 billion over five years through productivity improvements, operational savings, and mining-related efficiencies.

Move mammoth SAP estate into the public cloud

To achieve this big efficiency leap, Rio Tinto launched a major digital transformation, beginning with a project to run mission- critical business systems such as SAP more economically. In 2015, Rio Tinto formed a strategic partnership with Accenture—and its partner ecosystem including Avanade and Microsoft—and began a systematic effort to:

Move its massive SAP estate into the Microsoft Azure (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/) cloud platform to gain greater agility. Modernize line-of-business applications running in Rio Tinto datacenters and migrate them to Azure. Implement a pilot Internet of Things (IoT) solution that will take real-time data from trucks, drills, smelters, and other equipment and analyze it in Azure to gain equipment health, preemptive maintenance, supply chain efficiency, and other operational intelligence.

“We selected Accenture to help us manage this undertaking based on its global delivery capabilities, its vision for the journey to cloud, and its ability to support our digital transformation program,” says Eben du Toit, General Manager of Business Solution Services at Rio Tinto. “After discussions with Accenture and SAP, we all agreed that Azure was the best platform choice for

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our business requirements. Accenture is a strong partner with both SAP and Microsoft, and Rio Tinto is largely a Microsoft shop.”

Accenture oversaw a meticulous planning and design effort, then orchestrated the migration of 24 SAP applications (FI, CO, MM, SD, AM, PP, PM, HR-PY, PI, Business Warehouse, and others) and 35 terabytes (TB) of data to Azure in just 75 hours. Approximately 250 Rio Tinto, Accenture, Avanade, SAP, and Microsoft staff members worldwide planned and tested the approach for 16 months and worked one weekend to pull off the enormous migration. Rio Tinto went live with production SAP in Azure in August 2016.

Rio Tinto has one of the largest implementations of SAP in any public cloud, spanning sandbox, development/testing, quality assurance, pre-production, and production environments. Its SAP estate—which is vital for the company’s enterprise resource planning, financial management, business intelligence, and many other functions—uses two Azure datacenters in Australia with more than 1,000 Azure Virtual Machines, hundreds of virtual networks, and a petabyte of Azure Storage. Of that petabyte, more than 600 TB are Azure Premium Storage.

Rio Tinto runs SAP in an Azure infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) environment, including Azure Virtual Machines (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/virtual-machines/) , Azure Virtual Network (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/virtual-network/) , Azure Storage (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/storage/) , and Azure Backup (https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/backup/) . Accenture manages and supports the multi-cloud estate using its Accenture Cloud Platform (https://www.accenture.com/us-en/cloud-platform- management) (ACP) capability, which enables provisioning and management of services across a hybrid-cloud landscape, including Azure in particular. ACP also provides insights into cloud spending, utilization, and continual recommendations to cost- optimize the estate.

Increase cash flow, ability to pivot

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has vacated four datacenters—two production and two disaster recovery facilities—which has reduced IT operating costs by 30 percent.

Although still in the early days of its transformation, the company already sees an exciting agility boost across its business. Developers and business teams now upgrade a smaller virtual machine to a larger virtual machine with a couple of mouse-clicks —versus waiting weeks for servers to be ordered and set up. Innovation teams set up infrastructure for proof-of-concept projects in days versus months, which helps Rio Tinto develop safer, faster mining techniques and bring products to market sooner.

“With SAP running in Azure, we can deploy needed infrastructure faster and thus respond faster to pricing volatility in commodities, exchange rate fluctuations, and business needs,” says Steve Somerville, Head of Enterprise IT Services at Rio Tinto. “We can smartly connect our infrastructure, software applications, data, and operations capabilities to become an agile, intelligent, digital business that better navigates the many variable cycles in our business.”

Transform services with IoT efficiencies

By moving SAP and other business-critical applications to Azure, Rio Tinto has also laid a foundation for using data to drive organization-wide productivity with smart, automated trucks, trains, drills, and blast systems. The company has begun to collect real-time equipment and facility data and analyze it to promote new levels of efficiency.

Rio Tinto, Accenture, and Avanade are developing a connected- mine IoT solution filled with automated, IoT-driven functionality aimed at optimizing the company’s supply chain and improving business processes and operational efficiencies.

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Securely empower field workers with data, mobile teamwork

While modernizing and moving its datacenter assets to Azure, Rio Tinto also adopted a full range of cloud-based tools for employees. Under the program banner “21st Century Digital,” Rio Tinto is enabling workers with Microsoft 365 Enterprise (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365) , which gives them access to cloud-based productivity, communications, and collaboration services while protecting corporate data and mobile devices with state-of-the-art security technologies.

“We’re also focused on changing how we work so that we meet the expectations of a multigenerational workforce,” says Debbie Wilson, Head of End User Experience at Rio Tinto. “Millennials will soon dominate our workforce, and Generation Z is coming along. We need to offer different work styles to accommodate and attract them. Mobility is core to their culture of work, so we want a good, highly secure mobile platform that gives people a lot of choice. We also want to simplify the ‘administrivia’ of our jobs so that employees can focus on where they deliver value.”

As part of 21st Century Digital, Rio Tinto supports field workers who have company-owned mobile devices while also allowing them to use their own. It manages and protects them using Microsoft Intune (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/cloud-platform/microsoft- intune) and Microsoft Azure Active Directory (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/cloud-platform/azure-active-directory) in Microsoft Enterprise Mobility + Security (https://www.microsoft.com/en- us/cloud-platform/enterprise-mobility-security) —part of Microsoft 365. With Intune, Rio Tinto remotely manages and secures all the mobile devices and applications. By using Intune app protection policies, Rio Tinto can protect company data at the application level, even on personal devices.

Employees will use Azure Active Directory to easily authenticate themselves to corporate applications. On the company-owned devices, the Windows 10 (https://www.microsoft.com/en- us/windowsforbusiness/windows-product-home) operating system provides © 2017 Microsoft

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yet another layer of data security. The company is just beginning its rollout of Windows 10, to eventually encompass 33,000 PCs, but the IT staff is eager to embrace the efficiencies of Windows as a service—receiving rolling upgrades from Microsoft without the work of large periodic upgrades.

With this security bedrock in place, Rio Tinto will be aggressively rolling out the many productivity services in Microsoft Office 365 (https://products.office.com/en-us/business/explore-office-365-for-business) , such as SharePoint Online for content collaboration, Exchange Online for email, Yammer for enterprise social networking, OneDrive for shared storage, and Skype for Business Online for voice and video calling.

The shift to Office 365 also will help workers learn on the go. Rather than finding and sitting at a PC for hours at a time, workers can use smartphones and other mobile devices to access “bite- sized” lessons produced by Rio Tinto training staff and other employees. These employees will just record two-to-three-minute lessons on their mobile devices and post them on the SharePoint– based corporate intranet or Office 365 Video.

“It’s a game-changer to mobile-enable our tens of thousands of remote workers with Microsoft 365,” Wilson says. “We will be able to easily share safety and general corporate information with these workers, which will help them feel more connected to the organization and understand our business priorities. Our goal is ultimately to improve employee engagement, which translates into more invested employees, higher retention, and better results for customers.”

Create the future with a cloud foundation

As Rio Tinto continues its digital transformation—from datacenters to mobile devices—it is excitedly investigating the wealth of Azure services at its disposal. “We are looking at drones, IoT, RFID sensors, artificial intelligence, chatbots, and every other futuristic

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technology you can think of to do mining better, and with Azure we have a broad foundation for exploring all that,” Somerville says.

Find out more about Rio Tinto (http://www.riotinto.com/) on Twitter (https://twitter.com/riotinto) , YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/user/RioTintoVideos) , and LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/company/rio-tinto/) .

“ It’s a game-changer to mobile-enable our tens of thousands of remote workers with Microsoft 365. ”

—Debbie Wilson: Head of End User Experience —Rio Tinto

“ We are looking at drones, IoT, RFID sensors, artificial intelligence, chatbots, and every other futuristic technology you can think of to do mining better, and with Azure we have a broad foundation for exploring all that. ”

—Steve Somerville: Head of Enterprise IT Services —Rio Tinto

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