Birchwood Advisory exists to close one specific gap: the distance between the data already inside your ERP and the planning decisions it should be informing. Founded by a mobile equipment specialist with thirty years in the field.
Willie Jacobs has spent thirty years in mining and heavy industry — not as a consultant looking in from the outside, but as the person in the planning room managing the schedules, fighting with SAP, watching expensive components fail because nobody had a clear picture of what was coming. He knows what it costs when a component fails unexpectedly at a remote mine site. He knows what it costs — in production, in emergency repairs, in missed budgets — to get planned component replacement wrong.
His frustration was a specific one: the ERP holds the data. The trouble is getting at it. Mining operations run capable ERP systems — but they are typically configured for finance and compliance rather than for a planner's day, the screens that matter are awkward at best, and master data is treated as an afterthought. So Willie has spent years exporting Excel sheets, running pivot tables, and building Power BI dashboards to pull fragmented information into a shape someone could actually plan from. The ERP experts will tell you the system can. The question on a Tuesday morning at five o'clock is whether it does.
Birchwood Advisory is the attempt to bring that practitioner-grade thinking to mining operations as a structured advisory practice — across multiple modes of engagement, fitted to what each operation needs.
Most consulting engagements produce a report. The knowledge leaves with the consultant. Birchwood Advisory is structured differently: the expertise is embedded in the process and supported by technology, so the output is consistent, measurable, and cumulative. Every engagement builds a data picture that gets more precise over time. Every component replacement recorded adds to a benchmark dataset that improves the quality of planning for every client.
This is not advisory as a luxury.
It is advisory as infrastructure.
Thirty years across mining and heavy industry on four continents — Africa, North America, Australia, and South America. Experience spans mine expansion projects, open pit mining maintenance management, and turnaround/advisory work in both surface and underground operations. Started Birchwood Advisory to bring practitioner-grade maintenance advisory to mining operations across the full discipline — assessment, planning, strategy, and materials.
First conversations are a scoping call — no fee, no obligation — to understand the fleet, the operation, and where the work would land.
