By Phil Burton Business Support Manager at Mining Plus
This month we want to focus on the Business Support Team (BST) at Mining Plus. The Business Support Team (BST) was established to provide the administration services to the company, facilitating administration processes and enabling the consultants to focus on the project work.
The focus of the team has been both global and in country where applicable.
This is the context of the BST
Currently supporting over 120 full time consultants plus sub-contractors and casuals
9 Offices | 5 Countries | 7 time zones
Over 120 projects and invoices per month
Debtors book spread over 6 continents
23 different nationalities in the team from a cultural perspective
Travel bookings in excess of 200 flights a month
The level of collaboration and communication has increased dramatically over the past 24 months and made continuous demands for an improved level of service. This saw the launch of the new project management platform – Accelo, and the HR and Recruitment platform – BambooHR.
The Business Support Team
The team consists of the BST Manager – Phil Burton;
Nick Nifakos and David Geddes manage and administer the commercial checks for all entities. They both oversee a rigorous opportunity management process – Due Diligence by Nick Nifakos, and Commercial Contract Reviews (greater exposure and risk complexity as the geographical spread) by David Geddes.
Each entity has a Project Management Accountant driving the invoicing and project administration, being Kurt Funnekotter (middle) and Soraya Vernall (left) in Australia, Julie Bothwell in North America, Carlos Bravo (right) in Peru, and more recently Arianna Zilio in the Bristol, UK Office.
Julie Bothwell plays a vital role in the Vancouver office and holds all things together for the North American entities.
The HR and recruitment facilitation is handled primarily by Taryn Maclean in Australia and Sandra Mucci in North America respectively.
More recently, Marie Papas has joined the team as the Marketing and Social Media coordinator and is helping raise the Mining Plus brand to a new level.
In addition to this, Brittany Lock is the User Experience Analyst and has driven the post-implementation process of Accelo and BambooHR as the two main platforms within Mining Plus.
Rosalbina Brignetti in Peru, and Amy Britton in Australia have ably assisted the team over the past year as well.
Responsibilities of the Business Support team
The BST is responsible for providing administrative services to the Leadership Team and the Consultants. Within the BST all the Mining Plus technology, IT and software is managed which includes project management platform (Accelo) training and the induction processes.
These services include the following;
The commercial aspects of the business including the invoicing, debtor management, set up of projects, customers and sub-contractors;
Contractual matters relating to work and personnel;
The due diligence process in proposal phase investigating credit worthiness and risk management and in the set-up of the customer in the acceptance phase ensuring terms and conditions have been signed and agreed upon (global network of projects);
The oversight of the time scheduling in the Project Management Platform (Accelo);
The HR facilitation functions in conjunction with Byrnecut HR and payroll, leave applications and approvals, retention strategies, office functions;
Administration inductions;
The facilitation process for recruitment, onboarding, performance reviews and separation in BambooHR;
Providing marketing support to the Leadership Team including the oversight of keeping the data in Project Management Platform accurate and clean;
Office administration and support;
Travel facilitation;
Requisitions and purchase orders in liaison with Byrnecut Accounts;
Reimbursement process in liaison with Byrnecut Accounts;
All Business Support enquiries
User Experience Development
Management and Operational Reporting
Financial Reporting in conjunction with Byrnecut Accounts
HR and Recruitment process – BambooHR – Onboarding and Inductions
Mining Plus outsources it's IT and Technology platform to One Technology with Jason Willison and Josh Keogh being vital strategic partners ably assisting with the large amounts of data, the 24 hour response and connectivity required across the global team.