Faced with a downturn in gold prices and rising exploration costs, Barrick Gold,like others in the industry, was under pressure to reduce operational costs. Barrick believed the best way to do that was to improve its utilization of operations and business data. A team inside Barrick believed that by signing an Enterprise agreement (EA) with OSIsoft and better leveraging their existing PI System™, the company could improve utilization of corporate data and dramatically reduce operational costs. But signing an EA would require a large, unbudgeted, capital expenditure at a time when the company was focused on cutting costs.