Back-office that keeps up with 24/7 operations
Mining and metallurgy run continuously across remote sites, shifts, and time zones. Production data, vendor flows, maintenance, and compliance reporting move through legacy systems that were never designed to talk to each other. Primo deployments in this sector handle the cross-system work that keeps operations going without adding people on every shift.
Where operations never stop and the back-office still has to keep pace
Mining and metals operations don't pause. Shifts rotate, ore moves, equipment runs, but the back-office that surrounds them — procurement, finance, HR, compliance — works on a five-day cycle and a different set of systems. The gap between operational reality and administrative throughput is where automation pays off.
The data landscape is also unusually fragmented. Operational systems at the mine or smelter — SCADA, CMMS, fleet management, weigh-bridges — were specified for production reliability, not integration. Corporate systems — ERP, finance, procurement — were specified for control, not real-time feeds. Bridging them has historically meant Excel files and human re-entry.
Primo deployments in this sector run inside the customer infrastructure boundary, including isolated operational networks at site level where required. See deployment architecture →
Mines · concentrators · smelters and refineries · logistics and rail · metals trading · port operations · corporate back-office serving multi-site operations
Typical workflows we automate in mining and metals
Each pattern below is a recurring scenario across our mining and metals deployments. The focus here is what gets automated and how — typical outcomes across all patterns are aggregated in the section below.
- 01
Operational data flows from site to corporate
Production volumes, shift handovers, downtime events, and quality readings need to reach corporate reporting and finance on a daily — sometimes hourly — basis. Most of this data starts in operational systems that were never wired into ERP.
What Primo automates
- Collection from SCADA, fleet-management, weigh-bridge, and lab systems
- Validation and normalization across heterogeneous shift logs
- Posting to ERP, financial reporting, and group-level dashboards
- Exception flagging when production data disagrees with downstream movements
- Daily and end-of-shift reports to operations and finance
- 02
Procurement and vendor risk management
Mining sites buy heavy equipment, consumables, contractor services, and energy from hundreds of vendors. Each new vendor needs financial-soundness review, sanctions screening, capability verification, and HSE-credential checks before they can be onboarded. Data lives across external rating sources, internal ERPs, and document archives.
What Primo automates
- Vendor data collection from credit bureaus, registries, and rating sources
- Cross-checks against internal master data and sanctions lists
- HSE and certification document validation
- Risk flagging and escalation routing to procurement and compliance
- Contract metadata extraction and handoff to legal
- 03
Maintenance scheduling and parts coordination
Asset-intensive operations need continuous coordination between maintenance plans, parts availability, work orders, and crew scheduling. Each of these typically lives in a separate system — CMMS, ERP, HR scheduling — with no native integration and a long lag between plan and execution.
What Primo automates
- Synchronization between CMMS, ERP, and HR or crew scheduling systems
- Parts availability matching against maintenance plans, with reorder triggers
- Work order generation and routing to the right crew
- Compliance reporting for safety-critical maintenance events
- Variance reports back to operations and reliability engineering
- 04
Invoice and contractor payment processing
Mining operations process invoices from contractors, heavy-equipment lessors, fuel suppliers, and service providers — each on different terms, formats, and approval workflows. Three-way match against POs and goods receipts is slow at the volumes most operations now run.
What Primo automates
- Invoice ingestion from email, vendor portals, and shared folders
- Field extraction across heterogeneous invoice templates
- 3-way match against PO and goods receipt records in ERP
- Exception routing for human-in-the-loop review on edge cases
- Payment release and posting back to ERP
- 05
Regulatory and ESG reporting
Mining is one of the most heavily reported industries: production statistics, royalties, environmental monitoring, safety incidents, workforce composition, and increasingly ESG and sustainability indicators. Most of this data exists across many systems and ends up being assembled by hand under tight deadlines.
What Primo automates
- Data collection from environmental monitoring, HR, finance, and operational systems
- Validation against regulatory templates and prior submissions
- Generation of regulatory filings, royalty calculations, and ESG disclosures
- Audit-trail capture for every figure submitted
- Routing through internal review before external publication
What customers in mining and metals typically see
Aggregated ranges based on industry RPA benchmarks for the sector and Primo's deployments across mines, smelters, and metals trading operations. For customer-attested numbers from individual deployments, see customer stories →
Reduction in time spent on cross-system data work
Across operational data flows and reconciliation. Depends on system landscape.
Reduction in invoice processing errors
After stabilization, with 3-way match against PO and goods receipt.
Throughput improvement in reporting cycles
For regulatory, royalty, and ESG reporting, compared with manual assembly.
Reduction in operational cost of back-office processes
In automated workflows across finance, procurement, and maintenance coordination.
Ranges synthesized from industry analyst research and published RPA benchmarks for mining, metals, and heavy-industry operations. Individual deployment results depend on baseline maturity, process scope, and integration complexity.
Mining and metals deployments typically integrate with ERP (SAP, Oracle, 1C), operational systems (SCADA, CMMS, fleet management, weigh-bridge), lab and quality systems, HR and crew scheduling, and regulatory and ESG reporting portals.
Built on Orchestrator·Robot·AI Server. For deployment topology and security posture in operational environments, see architecture.