Rio Tinto and SAP Signavio: Operational excellence through global process intelligence

Best Tech Awards 2026 Business Transformation

Rio Tinto is a world leading mining and metals businesses, driven by its purpose to find better ways to provide the materials the world needs for global development, modern infrastructure and energy transition. Its operations span six continents and 34 countries, where more than 60,000 employees play a critical role in supplying iron ore, copper, aluminium, lithium and other essential resources.

At its core, in a journey towards operational excellence and to unlock the full value of its assets, Rio Tinto’s Modern ERP program is using SAP Signavio, SAP LeanIX, WalkMe and an integrated transformation toolchain to create a single, governed view of business processes across the enterprise. The initiative connects applications, data objects, risks, controls and business roles to business processes, providing visibility, understanding, and alignment on how work happens across the business and where targeted improvement can deliver the greatest business value.

Aligned to Rio Tinto’s ambition to become stronger, sharper and simpler, the transformation is moving process management from fragmented documentation to connected process intelligence. It gives the Modern ERP program and business-as-usual teams a common approach to safely reducing complexity, strengthen governance and target operational improvements with sharpened precision.

"Rio Tinto operates across a level of scale and complexity where process change must be disciplined, connected and evidence-led. The Modern ERP journey has given us the opportunity to pursue operational excellence, to rethink how we understand the way work is completed across the business – and improve it. SAP Signavio has helped create that foundation, by connecting processes to the systems, data, risks and controls around them. It’s giving our teams a more precise way to identify value, reduce unnecessary complexity and support our ambition to become stronger, sharper and simpler."

- David Blanch - Program Director, Modern ERP and Simplification Rio Tinto

Challenges

Rio Tinto operates one of the most complex and diverse mining and metals businesses in the world. It does so across multiple commodities, assets, functions and geographies at world-class operations that are committed to finding better ways to provide the materials the world needs, all while supporting local operating requirements that ensure shared success across the full scale of global operations.

The SAP ECC environment has supported Rio Tinto for close to two decades, but over time, and with business growth, acquired assets and through local requirements, it has become complex and highly customised. This has made it challenging for teams to commonly interpret and understand processes, their dependencies, how to assess downstream impacts and subsequently simplify them confidently – but safely.

As its Operational Excellence journey advances, Rio Tinto identified an opportunity to leverage Modern ERP as more than a technology renewal initiative, using it instead as a vehicle for real business transformation by strengthening how processes are understood, governed, and continuously improved.

For Rio Tinto’s process owners and transformation teams, the next step was to turn process knowledge into a shared capability. That meant creating a foundation where processes could be modelled, mined, governed and connected to the systems, data and controls around them, giving teams across the enterprise the confidence to improve with precision rather than navigate complexity and ambiguity through best efforts alone.

Rio Tinto sought to:

  • Create one view of process truth: Uniting process knowledge within a governed environment teams could trust and use consistently.
  • Connect processes to the wider business: Link processes to applications, data objects, risks, controls and business roles, to bring the ‘theory to life’.
  • Reduce transformation risk: Limit duplicated effort, inconsistent modelling practices and scope creep across the enterprise-wide Modern ERP program.
  • Support necessary variation: Understand and adopt local process variations while ensuring adherence to minimum global standards.
  • Build enduring capability: Move beyond process documentation and create a process intelligence foundation for continuous improvement.

Solution

For Rio Tinto’s mission to succeed, process clarity needed to be practical yet scalable. Teams needed a simpler, sharper way to see and understand how work happens across the

business, understand how the processes connect to systems, data and controls, and make strategic business and improvement decisions with confidence.

Rio Tinto adopted SAP Signavio as the process foundation for its Modern ERP journey, supported by SAP LeanIX, WalkMe and a broader integrated toolchain including RISE with SAP, SAP Cloud ALM, Tricentis and Syniti. Together, these solutions enabled a structured method through to connect how processes were designed and executed, to the applications, data, risks, controls and roles associated with them.

The approach was delivered through close collaboration between the Modern ERP program and the business-as-usual (BAU) process ownership teams. This ensured the capability

would not only support the S/4HANA transformation, but remain useful, relevant, and fit-for-purpose beyond go-live, when the business would inherit the solution. Defined business process modelling standards, robust process governance, and systematic training helped create a consistent way of working across commodity product groups, functions and regions.

The initiative established a central process governance framework that strengthened process discipline and maturity across the organisation. It also created a single, governed foundation for process intelligence, enabling teams to move from fragmented documentation to a shared, data-driven view where strategic decisions and targeted improvements can be made with surgical confidence.

It focused on:

  • SAP Signavio as the process backbone: Establishing a single source of truth for process modelling, process mining, governance and collaboration.
  • Connected process visibility: Linking processes to applications, data objects, risks, controls and business roles so teams could better understand dependencies and the link between people, process, technology and data.
  • Integrated transformation tooling: Using SAP LeanIX, WalkMe, SAP Cloud ALM, Tricentis and Syniti as part of the wider toolchain supporting architecture, adoption, lifecycle management, testing and data readiness.
  • Scaled process migration: Moving more than 2,500 processes from previous BPM tools and other information sources into the new environment.
  • Training and governance: Provisioning more than 1,200 Signavio licences and training more than 1,100 people across program and BAU teams, while ensuring adherence to consistent business process modelling standards across the enterprise.

Impact

SAP Signavio is advancing Rio Tinto’s operational excellence objective by providing a central process governance framework that has strengthened process discipline and maturity; establishing a measurable foundation for process intelligence during – and beyond – its Modern ERP journey. The transformation has driven simplicity, through the consolidation of process knowledge at scale; 2,500+ migrated processes from previous BPM tools, an additional 1,000+ target state business processes developed, 1,200+ Signavio licenses provisioned and 1,100+ people trained on how to use it, across the business. This foundation helps Rio Tinto move from process visibility to targeted value identification.

Prior to enterprise adoption, Rio Tinto conducted a Procure-to-Pay process intelligence pilot in 2024 where it tested the applicability of process mining, analysing more than 800,000 Purchase Orders across its Iron Ore and Aluminium businesses. Subsequently, in its Order-to-Cash (O2C) process, mining analysis was conducted on more than 6,300 sales orders and 17,500 invoices, providing process owners and transformation teams with an evidence-based view of actual execution across a complex value stream.

Measured progress and value:

  • Enterprise capability established: Rio Tinto established Signavio training modules globally and in multiple languages, delivering 67 Signavio training sessions, including 6 French-based sessions, helping build a consistent process language across global teams. Process mining for Modern ERP hypercare: Rio Tinto has adopted Signavio process intelligence to support Modern ERP hypercare, by baselining and monitoring business critical KPIs to measure business stability and enable targeted issue resolution.
  • Change governance strengthened: With Signavio acting as a single source of truth, processes are now linked to applications, data objects, risks, controls and business roles, reducing scope creep, duplicated effort and inconsistent practices.
  • O2C complexity made visible: SAP Signavio analysis identified 4,700 non-design variants, helping teams distinguish necessary operational variation from avoidable rework.
  • Control points prioritised: The analysis identified a 17.5% ATL (Authority to Load) revocation rate and around 3.5x benchmark, giving teams clearer visibility of where control gates require attention.
  • Value opportunities defined: Rio Tinto has identified a pathway to reduce late payments to nearly half (approximately ~15%), and unlock US$50M to US$90M in ‘on-time’ collection potential, with additional analysis and value realisation expected progressively through 2026. Overall, this enabled Rio Tinto to operate with discipline when targeting process improvements; reducing avoidable rework and simplifying complex work without losing operational nuance that its global business requires

2,500+ processes migrated
from previous BPM tools and additional 1,000+ target state processes developed
6,300+ sales orders and 17,500+ invoices analysed
through O2C Signavio process mining
US$50M – US$90M ‘on-time’ collection potential
identified as part of Rio Tinto’s O2C value pathway
1,200+ Signavio licences provisioned and 1,100+ people trained
across the business in <12 months
"Rio Tinto is a large organisation, and with any large organisation, a lot of time can be spent navigating how things work, how they are supposed to work, and how it all interconnects. Implementing SAP Signavio, thinking through our processes in a practical, deliberate and aligned way drives us to closing the gaps between reality and expectations. It creates a platform for our business improvement, linked to value and the way work is designed to be done.

We can then focus on fixing the system, not just reacting to the drift in isolation."

- Bradley Webb - General Manager, Business Readiness Rio Tinto