Creating one Rio Tinto

What is Improving performance together?
It’s a Group wide performance improvement programme that kicked off in 2005 and which has gained a lot of momentum this year. It represents the next step in Rio Tinto’s evolution. Previously we operated more as a federation of semi autonomous business units across the globe. This approach made us very successful. But we saw that we could become even more successful by truly operating as a Group – that is, capturing the best of what we have, making the most of our knowledge and scale and raising our game across all our business units. We have become more “joined up” and are acting much more as one Rio Tinto. By stepping up the pace and level of collaboration across the Group, we are more effectively tapping into our collective expertise. This is enabling us to deliver even more value.

Why this change ?
Historically our Group’s business model has served us very well. We’ve valued our business units’ autonomy which was underpinned by accountability for delivering value. But over time we became a bigger group with a lot of diverse businesses around the world. We saw that there were things that we could be doing better. We aspired to raise the game of all our business units to that of the very best.

How is the programme making this improvement possible?
Improving performance together is a suite of separate but interrelated initiatives that run in parallel and that support each other. We’re focusing on the core processes of our business: Mining, Processing, Marketing and Asset Management. These core processes are common across all our business units. We can bring performance to even higher levels by setting consistent performance goals for these processes and collaborating to deliver best practice to all areas. We are applying the same principles to our key support functions, reviewing the way they are structured and ensuring that all our policies and procedures are fully aligned. In the same vein, we’re introducing new IT and business systems. And we’ve improved how we plan and how we generate new investment opportunities.