Pieter W. Buys

The main objective of this research study is to investigate the extent to which business intelligence, competitive intelligence and marketing intelligence are used within the mining industry. Business intelligence, competitive intelligence and marketing intelligence are the management tools used to mine information to produce up-to-date intelligence and knowledge for operative and strategic decision making.
A structured questionnaire is used for the study. A total of 300 mines are randomly selected from a research population of mining organizations in South Africa, Africa and globally. The respondents are all part of senior management. A response rate of 64% is achieved. The results indicat that more than half of the respondents do not have real-time intelligence and proper data mining tools to identify patterns and relationships within a data warehouse. Although a large proportion agrees that their organizations have systematic ways of gathering these different types of intelligence and use them for strategic decision making, there is a significant proportion that did not have any systems.
Statistically and practically significant positive relationships with a large effect are found among the dimensions of business intelligence, marketing intelligence, competitive intelligence and perceived business performance

The main objective of this research study is to investigate the extent to which knowledge management is used within the mining industry.
Knowledge management includes the identification and examination of available and required knowledge and the subsequent planning and control of actions to develop knowledge assets to accomplish organizational objectives.
A structured questionnaire is used for the study. A total of 300 mines were randomly selected from a research population of mining organizations in South Africa, Africa and globally. The respondents were all part of senior management. A response rate of 64% was achieved.
A significant number of respondents indicates that there is no transfer of knowledge about the best practices within their organizations. Some of the participants indicate that their organizations do not have the required technical infrastructure to enable knowledge sharing whilst some agree that the culture in their organizations is not conducive to the sharing of knowledge.
A statistically and practically significant positive relationship with a large effect is found between the construct of knowledge management and perceived business performance. The mining organizations in Africa are ranked the lowest in terms of applications of knowledge management principles

The objective of this study is to investigate the extent to which strategic management process is utilized within the mining industry. Strategic planning is an organizational management activity that is used to set priorities, focus energy and resources, strengthen operations, ascertain that employees and other stakeholders are working toward common goals, establish agreement around intended outcomes, and assess and adjust the organization’s direction in response to a changing environment. A typical strategy management process has the following steps: initial assessment, situation analysis, strategy formulation, strategy implementation, monitoring and evaluation. The other objective is to determine which analytical tools are commonly used for situational, internal and external assessment as input to the strategic management process. A structured questionnaire was used for the study. A total of 300 mines were randomly selected from a research population of mining organizations in South Africa, Africa and globally. The respondents were all part of senior management. A response rate of 64% was achieved. The results indicated that about 20% of the organizations did not institutionalize their strategic planning functions and did not have a good strategic foundation. The results also showed that 60% were not satisfied with their productivity and 30% indicated that their cash flows were not stable at all. There was a significant number of organizations who do not use strategic analytical tools. A statistically and practically significant positive relationship was found between strategic management dimensions and business performance implying that the use of strategic management process can lead to improved business performance.

Keywords: strategy, strategic management, strategic planning, mining industry, strategic analytical tools.
JEL Classification: M100

It is accepted that SMEs are major contributors to global employment and GDP. Similarly, SMEs’ reliance on bank finance to maintain financial and operational sustainability is also globally accepted. In 2008, the Company’s Act of South Africa was amended to scrap the statutory audit requirement for qualifying entities, with the aim of alleviating the administrative burden of SMEs and increase their sustainability potential. As sound as this strategy may have been, a grey area arose in that banks may still insist on audited financial statements. This study investigates the question as to whether South African banks still consider audited financial statements as key in evaluating SME bank finance applications. This was done by analyzing the major banks’ requirements per their policies and follow-up discussions with loan officers. Contrary to expectations, the historic focus per audited financial statements was considered of much less importance than progressive future-oriented management statements and reports.

Access to bank financing is regularly rated as one of the biggest obstacles to SME sustainability. With the introduction of the independent review as an alternative to the statutory audit, banks may have inevitably lost their risk assessment reassurance that audits provided. Previous research found that banks have adjusted to this situation by no longer insisting on audited financial statements. The research undertaken in this study aims to, firstly, investigate SME owner/managers’ perceptions about what banks require when assessing bank loan applications; and, secondly, to gauge SME owner/manager’s attitudes towards the value they perceive accounting may contribute to their sustainability. It was found from an SME perspective, that although an independent review is the current way to go, many SME owner/managers consider their own accounting skills, as the language of business, to be lacking. This could potentially have repercussions in inadvertently promoting further asymmetric financial information, and thereby limiting successes in obtaining finance.