Abstract
The global resources and commodities market
has become highly competitive. While southern
Africa’s abundance of minerals resources is still
unrivalled, the region has lost its dominance in
terms of production. The sustainability of southern
Africa’s mining industry is increasingly
becoming dependent on its ability to manage the
performance of its operations well. A valuable
tool for monitoring and managing performance is
the use of key performance areas (KPAs) –
which are those areas of performance that are
reflected explicitly or implicitly in the vision and
strategies of an organization and reflect its critical
success factors. This paper reviews the KPAs in
the southern African mining delivery
environment.
The KPAs discussed in this paper have been
identified by comparing KPAs of several
mining houses engaged in mining operations in
southern Africa and extracting those that are
common to most of them. The authors support
the view that each organization should develop
KPAs to specifically fit its needs, the study reveals
that five KPAs – safety and health, costs, product
quality, morale and delivery should form a
default list that covers the key areas that any
organization should consider when choosing
KPAs. KPAs exist for performance management.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) exist for
performance measurement.
KPIs are those controllable areas of KPAs
that can be measured and here various KPIs
require control namely: Cutting Time, Away
Time, Downtime of various categories, Travelling
Time and others that have been identified
internationally.