As cost pressures weigh on resources players, a Perth team has developed a way to marry contract tendering with social media.
As cost pressures weigh on resources players, a Perth team has developed a way to marry contract tendering with social media.
A Perth business is hoping to revolutionise the resources contracting sector with an online social network platform intended to globalise and simplify the procurement process.
Co-founded by Mining Plus managing director Ben Auld and technology entrepreneur Paul Faix, Mineler markets itself as a “social marketplace for the mining industry”, with its product already gaining interest from big mining players and industry users.
Mr Faix, who chairs the company, is also an honorary consul for the Slovak Republic in Perth.
He said enabling companies to hire on demand would be one major change to the industry that could improve productivity, something Mineler hoped to do through its digital marketplace.
“Unfortunately mining companies are employing people with whole skills sets internally but they don’t really have enough work for them,” he said.
“Through Mineler, they can hire the right type of skills and people on demand for particular jobs and tasks as they appear.
“So all the extra overhead is eliminated.”
Improving labour mobility and allowing employees and businesses to bid for micro-tenders was the Mineler platform’s way of doing that, Mr Faix said, with an increase in bidding competition the desired outcome.
From a business perspective, the timing of the online platform couldn’t be better, as the sector‘s domestic focus becomes operational and it seeks to reduce costs.
Soft commodity prices are driving pressure, too.
Employees and companies can be rated through the platform, helping cut red tape for prequalification of contracts and making bidding more accessible.
The benefit for workers is that they can easily sell skills overseas too, with a geologist in Perth able to bid for work on projects in Chile, for example.
“Mineler is not designed to drive (wages) down … (it) is designed to get the right type of skill for good value,” Mr Faix said.
“At the moment, past experience of people in the mining industry is invisible.”
The international connection at Mineler also includes chief executive Arnold Stroobach, who is the Dutch honorary consul in WA.
He said one benefit of the platform was that, as a marketplace in itself, Mineler would be driven by the groups that used it, rather than the startup itself needing to deliver services.
“That’s why it is such a nice scalable system,” he said.
“It brings all the entrepreneurial power in the mining sector together in this platform.”
The company is working on its second round of financing, negotiating with several private investors for strategic partnerships.
Both the founding members and Mr Stroobach have stumped up capital already.
A further option would be joining the growing list of technology companies entering the bourse through reverse takeovers.
Mr Stroobach said he expected an announcement would be made soon.
Perth has been a hub of mining and resources-related technology development in the past decade.
A mobile application that provides a training portal for safety and risk assessment, Tap into Safety, has been well received, while Radlink has won awards for its product’s capacity to expand internet coverage at mine sites.
