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Lonmin

Rob Bellhouse, Lonmin's Company Secretary, discusses his company's decision for their Board of Directors to go paperless. Diligent Boardbooks® was the only solution that met all of their criteria, enabling them to switch from paper to digital. We did a fair amount of research into what was out there, a lot of Googling, a lot of talking to people, a lot of asking people who they’d shortlisted and tried out. And we found 13 products, of which we trialed three to see whether we liked them or not. But to be honest there was only one which actually ticked all our boxes and that was Diligent. So Lonmin is a miner and refiner of platinum group metals. We’re the world’s third largest producer of platinum which is about two-thirds of our business in a typical year. My role is to look after the board and also to look after the responsibilities that come with the London listing of our shares. The way I tend to think about the board is that you want the right people making the right decisions at the right time, in possession of the right information. That’s really what I see my job as being, to make all that happen. I think the cost saving is hard to quantify. And that wasn’t really why we went into it. We went into it because there was no other option, doing it via paper just wasn’t possible. Certainly paper does have a cost, because we had lots of directors based outside the country, were waiting for couriers to take stuff off to the airport to get it shipped out to the director overseas [0:04:41.9]. And to get the stuff ready for that courier we would have to throw resource at it. I think the maximum we’ve ever had was six people doing photocopying, hole punching, binding, collating, it was a nightmare process. When we went into it we were really looking at three things. We were looking at the quality of the product, the service we got from the vendor and the price. In terms of the quality we were very, very conscious this is a culture change for the directors. They’re used to working on paper with a pen and scribbling comments in the margins [0:05:56.6]. And we needed a product that really replicated that so that the culture change wasn’t actually a difficult thing to pull off. And because of the way Diligent works, it was a really easy sell for us. I used to see our CEO pitch up at meetings in South Africa where we had the board and all of its committee meeting, and he would have a lever arch file full of paper, literally. Now he will turn up with an iPad, which could have other things on it as well. So it’s very manageable. I mean typically we probably have 300 pages or so for a typical board pack [0:15:20.8]. But some of the meetings that we’ve had during the year, for example, approving a rights issue prospectus, and the annual report, that could have been as high as 850. When we were looking for a board portal we needed a combination of two things. There’s the backend functionality that we use as the company secretariat to actually prepare the board packs, and there’s the frontend functionality that the directors get usually on the iPad. We particularly like the ease of annotation for the directors. I find that very, very simple and easy to use. That’s a nice feature of the product. The directors will mark them up with all sorts of marginal comments, which you need to manage. You also have the issues about what happens to the board pack at the end of its life. A lot of the directors would leave them for us to destroy, others would take them home, but when they come to clear out their home offices you have no idea what happens to them. They could be in a black bag at the tip for all you know. So the beauty for us of a portal was it did enable us to create some security around the board papers. That was a really valuable thing for us to do. We commissioned an external IT expert to check the security from two sources really, one, to make sure that it was secure but also to make sure that there was no danger of the system falling over and being unavailable for any protracted periods of time. And it met all our expectations. That’s a nice feature of the product From my perspective as the meeting manager pulling papers together, it’s really straightforward and flexible. If you get late changes with another paper that you weren’t expecting, it’s so easy to accommodate it, very, very straightforward. Oh, it’s radically easier. I mean now it’s just a simple case of receiving papers via email or things which I’ve created myself and you just simply drag and drop them on a web page, it’s as simple as that.