22 / 64
COVER STORY
20
MODERN MINING
November 2015
past it has generally been necessary for clients
to change ‘horses’ during the project cycle.
“Typically, they may employ a high level advi-
sory consultancy to conceptualise a project and
work out its broad parameters in terms of the
business case, ownership structures, funding,
contractual arrangements and the like. They
would then have to change in mid-cycle to an
engineering consultancy for engineering and
delivery management, with inevitable disrup-
tion to project continuity and turnaround time.
With Advisian, this is no longer necessary. All
the skills and expertise needed are available
from a single source.”
He adds that the establishment of Advisian
as a standalone business line with its own dis-
tinct identity emphasises its independence
within the greater WorleyParsons group. “All
the Advisian offices report to Dennis Finn,
who was recruited from advisory firm PwC
in 2014 to become global CEO of Advisian.
This is an important point. Clients want the
assurance that those who advise them are inde-
pendent and – where they are part of a larger
group – not simply pushing the interests and
agenda of their parent organisation. Obviously,
Advisian is a business line of WorleyParsons
but the way it is structured gives it consider-
able independence and allows it to align itself
unconditionally with the interests of its cli-
ents. The use of a separate name also sharply
differentiates Advisian from WorleyParsons,
which is primarily seen in the marketplace as
an EPCM and PMC contractor.”
Advisian is not simply an amalgamation of
the skills of Evans & Peck and the consulting
services that were provided by WorleyParsons.
It also incorporates the expertise of two other
recent acquisitions of WorleyParsons, namely
MTG, a Houston-based resource management
consulting firm specialising in the chemicals
and petrochemicals sectors, and INTECSEA,
focused on offshore engineering.
Last year WorleyParsons announced the
restructuring of its business – as the culmination
of its in-depth review of operations – into three
business lines, namely Services, Major Projects
and Improve. The establishment of Advisian
adds a fourth business line to the group. All the
business lines operate over three customer sec-
tors, namely Hydrocarbons, Minerals, Metals &
Chemicals, and Infrastructure.
While Advisian will be targeting all these
sectors in Africa, historically the local opera-
tion has had an extremely strong presence in
the minerals and metals industry. “The big-
gest part of Advisian’s workload in Africa is
still being derived from this sector,” says Rob
McGill. “There’s no question, of course, that
mining is in a severe downturn but we have a
healthy workload of study and consulting work
given the constrained environment. We have
some significant sized current projects from a
technical consulting point of view that we have
been working on for a number of years. With
these projects now well into execution, our ser-
vices business is now taking the lead but we’re
still doing some study and engineering work.”
McGill mentions that Advisian is currently
conducting several strategy and technical
options analyses for customers in the gold
and platinum sectors locally and in Zimbabwe
using its StepWise methodology. “This is typi-
cally applied before the pre-feasibility stage
of a project,” he says. “In a four to six-week
time-frame, it delivers a quantified range of sce-
narios and options for the project, as well as a
detailed roadmap to execution and assessment
of the risks and opportunities. The key to this
approach is to try to define and work towards
certain project ‘metrics-for-success’ and to
build a financial model from the start to test
and quantify different options and scenarios.
“This allows the project’s strategic options to
be defined at an early stage and this is used to
manage and govern all activities such as drill-
ing and base-line data-gathering, so as to align
WorleyParsons is the
EPCM contractor for
Shondoni, which is
essentially a new 9,2 Mt/a
mine designed to replace
the existing Middelbult
operation of Sasol Mining.
The innovation that
WorleyParsons – and
potentially Advisian – can
bring to projects was well
illustrated earlier this
year when the lifting and
positioning of the mine’s
winder house took place.
The lifting operation is
seen here.