Enabling The Royal Mint’s Sustainable Precious Metals Programme with Dynamics 365

The Customer

The Royal Mint, established over a thousand years ago, is one of the world’s leading authorities in producing coins and metals. Located in the United Kingdom, the Royal Mint has a rich history and is responsible for minting the country’s official currency, the British pound sterling. With its state-of-the-art facilities and expertise in precision minting, the Royal Mint produces high-quality coins and commemorative medals that are cherished by collectors and used in everyday transactions. The institution’s commitment to innovation and security ensures the integrity and trustworthiness of the currency it produces, making the Royal Mint a symbol of excellence in the field of numismatics.

The Challenges

Like all forward-thinking manufacturing organisations, The Royal Mint has come to recognise the undeniable importance of sustainability and is factoring sustainability practices into its everyday operations.

Later this year, The Royal Mint is opening a plant to recover precious metals from electronic waste. Once up and running the precious metals’ recovery site is expected to process 90 tonnes of UK-sourced e-waste every week. Embarking on its world-first Sustainable Precious Metals (SPM), The Royal Mint recognised the need for a seamlessly established new ERP system to assist the entire manufacturing process – from the minute the e-waste is sourced, all the way through to products reaching the consumer. That includes being able to track e-waste as soon as it comes in, manage the process of removing component parts, identify them, and then move them into The Royal Mint’s business. Building an effective ERP system was therefore “critical”, but also served as a huge opportunity for The Royal Mint.

The Solution

Hitachi Solutions worked closely with The Royal Mint team to deliver a people and business-led engagement which initially focused on understanding their needs and goals. Prioritising the needs and working out what enabling technology was required within the Microsoft technology stack to turn the needs into real-world outcomes. Since then, we have continued our relationship with The Royal Mint to implement Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management solution, to support their ground-breaking journey. The design and build of The Royal Mint’s new ERP solution will prove to be extremely sustainable in the long term. Working collaboratively and supporting The Royal Mint on their journey saw a Minimum Viable Product delivered within 15 weeks of inception by January and phase two is already at the end, implementing a second phase of change.

Jamie Watson, Client Director, Hitachi Solutions explains: “From a technology perspective, this involves the full suite of Dynamics 365 Business Applications, the Power Platform, Azure and the Data and AI platforms. From a people perspective, it’s centred around change management and digital innovation.”

The Royal Mint has also transitioned its on-premises organisation to the Cloud, allowing for greater technological flexibility and the ability to stay current. It also enables integrations to be fast and effective, allowing The Royal Mint to scale up the product during busier periods and to be elastic without conscious thought. Moreover, moving to the cloud has allowed The Royal Mint to enhance its data management and cybersecurity, both of which lie at the heart of its technology strategy. A data management function has been created to appropriately surface information to the business, which is self-serving and maintains an organised, controlled and secure data team.

The Future

As Hitachi Solutions and The Royal Mint continue to work as a collective team, the project will provide huge opportunities for innovation. Focusing on adding new functionalities with Microsoft Power Platform, robotic process automation, and new technologies such as AI and machine learning. All of these will undoubtedly become relevant to the project and provide significant long-term benefits to The Royal Mint, as we hope to see other mints around the world seek to take on similar approaches.