As a child growing up in the Cape Breton coal-mining community of Glace Bay, John Morgan attended Warden United Church and, to this day, he remembers the stained glass windows and the coal miners depicted alongside the usual religious imagery.

The history of coal mining in B.C.'s Elk Valley surprisingly starts with gold because, like most mining activities in the early 1860s in Western Canada, that was the hot commodity of the times.

Vancouver-based Teck Resources operates six coal mines in British Columbia and Alberta. The desire to co-ordinate workflow among them and manage inventory efficiently had the coal division looking for enterprise resource planning software that...