Australian mining and asset-intensive operators’ profitability, more than ever, hinges on how effectively you manage what you buy, how you stock it, and how you use external contractors, not just on the headline commodity prices. Rising input costs, labour constraints, and higher capital intensity mean procurement, parts and component supply chains, inventory, and contractor spend are now core levers of margin, not background activity.
Whether your operations rely on heavy mobile fleets from Caterpillar, Hitachi, Liebherr, or Komatsu, fixed processing assets, or rail and port infrastructure, the pattern is consistent: there is significant value trapped in how spend is specified, sourced, stocked, and deployed to keep assets running. The broader opportunity extends into maintenance and operational excellence, which we will explore in the rest of this article series, but the first step is to get control of where the money is going today.
The opportunity is not theoretical. It exists today in your working capital, your supplier relationships, your logistics network, and your production systems, which can be largely invisible to operation leaders.
The question is not whether the value exists, but how quickly it can be unlocked.
Procurement Cost: Parts, Services, and Contractors
In mining and asset-intensive industries, procurement commonly represents 40–60% of operating expenditure once you combine materials, parts, consumables, and contractor services. Yet many organisations still rely on legacy contracts, fragmented categories, and inconsistent sourcing strategies.
Typical issues include:
- Above-market OEM and aftermarket pricing for critical components and wear parts
- Significant levels of waste and poor control of purchasing demand
- Limited leverage across sites or business units, with each site negotiating and buying in isolation
- Category strategies focused on unit price rather than total cost and reliability
- Contractor panels that have grown organically, with overlapping scopes and unclear performance expectations
A structured approach to category management, supplier and contractor strategy, and demand visibility can deliver large, sustainable cost reductions. This includes standardising specifications where appropriate, aggregating demand across operations, resetting commercial terms to reflect actual consumption and risk, and clarifying when contractors are used versus in-house resources.
Client insight – procurement cost
- Client situation:
“A tier 1 mining contractor was struggling to leverage global volume to secure cost-effective supply arrangements”
- Our Solution:
“We built category strategies for critical parts and services, consolidated supplier and contractor panels, reset commercial terms on priority contracts, and improved demand visibility across sites.”
- The Result:
“>$48 million in cost reduction driven by 6 global supply tenders and 10 national tenders & negotiations across parts, consumables, and contractor categories.”
The Growing Margin Squeeze in Spend and Stock
Across Australia, operators are seeing margin pressure from the way material and services spend has evolved:
- Costs for parts, consumables, and contractors rising faster than production volumes
- Excess working capital tied up in slow-moving or obsolete inventory
- Expensive urgent freight and workaround sourcing to cover planning gaps
- Fragmented supplier and contractor panels that limit leverage and consistency
- Data and system gaps that make it hard to see true total cost of ownership
These issues rarely sit in isolation. A poorly structured component or GET contract can drive higher inventory holdings and more urgent freight, while inconsistent contractor scopes inflate both rate and total hours. Over time, these interactions quietly erode margins and reduce the capital available for growth projects.
Client insight – overall margin squeeze
- Client situation:
“A diversified mining group had increasing business expenses of ~30% over 3 years with reduced throughput, negatively impacts EBITDA & $/ton”
- Our solution:
“We used Value Driver Trees to assess throughput & cost performance, review the effectiveness of current priorities, and align stakeholders around key impacts on EBITDA”
- The Result:
“Within 12 months, EBITDA margin improved by $25M with a transformation roadmap defined to achieve a further $60M in EBITDA uplift”
Parts and Component Supply Chain
The availability and cost of parts and components directly shape asset reliability and maintenance performance. Many organisations have supply chains that were designed for growth and resilience first, and only later asked to deliver efficiency and cost discipline.
Common pain points are:
- Multiple OEM and non-OEM suppliers for similar component families, with limited global leverage
- Inconsistent lead times and reliability performance across suppliers and sites
- Ad hoc expediting and urgent freight to cover forecasting and planning gaps
- Limited alignment between maintenance strategies and replenishment logic
Improving the parts and component supply chain means integrating sourcing, planning, and logistics decisions. This often involves rationalising supplier portfolios, aligning stocking strategies with criticality and lead times, and building better collaboration with key OEM and non-OEM suppliers on forecasting and inventory positioning.
Client insight – parts and component supply chain
- Client situation:
“An Australian based global mining services major needed to transform their supply chain in line with strategic ambitions to grow their Open-Cut, Underground and Civil lines of business.”
- How we did it:
“We redesigned the parts supply chain, rationalised the supplier base, aligned stocking policies to asset criticality and lead times, and introduced joint forecasting with strategic OEM and non-OEM suppliers.”
- Result:
“$15.5M in costs were pulled out of the supply chain and a centralised distribution centre was established to improve inventory performance”
Inventory: Releasing Capital While Protecting Uptime
Inventory remains one of the largest sources of trapped capital in mining and asset-intensive operations. Excess holdings of parts, consumables, and tools tie up working capital and storage space, while poor planning still lets stock-outs impact uptime.
Typical challenges include:
- Safety stocks set using rules of thumb, not demand patterns or asset criticality
- Obsolete or slow-moving materials accumulating across multiple sites
- Weak linkage between maintenance plans, project schedules, and inventory policies
- Limited use of alternative stocking models such as vendor-managed inventory or consignment
With better forecasting, service-level segmentation, and replenishment logic, operators can reduce inventory and improve availability at the same time. Clearer stocking rules based on risk and consequence of failure, combined with stronger supplier integration, allow capital to be released from stores and redeployed to higher-return uses.
Client insight – inventory
- Client situation:
“A diversified mining contractor providing comprehensive end-to-end surface and underground mining services was struggling with the scale of their inventory holdings and condition”
- Our Solution:
“The program combined inventory optimisation review, ABC XYZ analysis, improved alignment with maintenance and shutdown plans, material segmentation and condition assessments to reduce inventory.”
- The Result:
“Over 12 months we supported the reduction in inventory holdings by $12M.”
Contractor Spend: Getting Value, Not Just Hours
Contractor spend has grown rapidly as operators outsource maintenance, shutdowns, projects, and specialist services. While this can add flexibility and access to capability, it also creates new risks to cost and performance if not managed deliberately.
Common issues include:
- Panels that have grown over time without clear scope differentiation
- Uncontrolled ancillary costs such as travel, vehicle and accommodation charges
- Inconsistent use of incentives and penalties linked to safety, quality, and availability outcomes
- Rate cards negotiated in isolation from productivity and performance measures
- Weak planning and supervision, which increases both hours and rework
Improving contractor performance and cost requires tightening both the commercial framework and the operational interface. This often includes clarifying where contractors are truly adding value, standardising scopes and measures of success, and linking higher-level KPIs to the same throughput, availability, and cost metrics used for internal teams.
Client insight – contractor spend
- Client situation:
“A major mining contractor was challenged with a heavily diversified supplier list and high costs for shutdown and maintenance spend”
- Our Solution:
“We rationalised contractor panels, reset commercial terms and KPIs, strengthened planning and supervision standards, and linked incentives to safety, quality, and availability outcomes rather than hours worked.”
- The Result:
“Within 4 months the category achieved a $3M per annum saving and reduction from 60 vendors to 5”
How This Links to Operational Excellence and Maintenance
Spend, stock, and contractor management are not separate from operational excellence and maintenance, they are core enablers. Poorly aligned procurement and inventory decisions can undermine even the best maintenance strategy or throughput improvement program.
In later articles in this series, we explore how to:
- Identify and relieve system constraints to improve throughput without major capital
- Align maintenance philosophies with asset strategy and supply chain design
- Use data and frontline engagement to build sustainable operational excellence programs
When these elements are integrated, operators can move from reactive cost cutting and crisis management to a more deliberate model where cost, capital, and throughput are managed together.
Client insight – integration with ops excellence
- Client situation:
“An integrated mining and processing operation was running multiple improvement initiatives with limited impact on overall system throughput.”
- Result:
“A transformation office framework was established to implement the transformation, and we were engaged to support the team to embed the change delivering $25M EBIT benefits in 2025.”
- How we did it:
“With the site & global SME teams we designed a transformation roadmap, broken down into 90-day plans for the top priorities to combine supply-side changes in procurement, inventory, and contractor management with a constraint-focused operational excellence program and a refreshed maintenance strategy.”
How Argon & Co Helps
Argon & Co works with mining and asset-intensive organisations across Australia to improve profitability by reshaping how procurement, inventory, and contractor spend support operational and maintenance performance.
Our teams bring hands-on experience across:
- Heavy industry performance improvement across a range of mining, metals, and infrastructure projects
- Logistics optimisation, including establishment of industrial scale Distribution Centres to improve service level and reduce inventory
- Procurement cost reduction and category strategy for parts, consumables, and contractors
- Inventory optimisation and working capital release, aligned with maintenance and project needs
- Parts and component supply chain design, including supplier portfolio and stocking strategies
- Integration of spend, stock, and contractor management into broader operational excellence programs
We focus on quantifying the opportunity, delivering visible cost and capital benefits, and embedding the systems, processes, and behaviours needed to sustain them. The value is already present in your contracts, stores, and contractor relationships, the real question is how quickly you can convert it into margin and capacity for growth.
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Daniel Jackson
Associate Partner, Australia
