Can drillers actually go paperless at the rig?

The Challenge

Terra Drilling’s owner-operators and husband and wife team, Jeremy ('Toad') and Pat, have grown a successful drilling business that has expanded to 8 diamond rigs and 45 staff since its inception in 2008. And whilst they were thrilled with the growth they had achieved together, they were less thrilled about the ever-increasing amount of time they were having to spend in the office re-entering plod data into spreadsheets to bill their clients and track performance.

It seemed that no matter how many people they hired, or hours they worked, they never seemed to be able to stay on top of the hundreds of sheets of paperwork that needed to be processed each week.

Pat and Toad knew they wanted to go digital, but it couldn’t be limited to just digital plods. In fact, they wanted their drillers to never have to use paper on the rig ever again.

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The Solution

Terra Drilling needed a complete end-to-end digital solution that digitised all of the data that drillers were capturing at the rig. But they also had several other requirements on their wishlist. Terra wanted a system that could:

help the drillers collect accurate diamond drilling data, quickly.
have inbuilt safeguards that make sure the data is correct before it gets sent to the client
store digital copies of all of the documents that Pat was having to print and pack for the drillers at the beginning of every new project.
work offline in case the crews were drilling outside of mobile coverage.

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How Terra Drilling used CorePlan to do this - and more

Terra Drilling engaged the CorePlan team to help them digitise all of their drilling data at the rig using the CorePlan drilling app. Using the app, their drillers are able to capture and upload all of the diamond drilling and operational data they need in less than 10 minutes per day, including digital take 5s, pre-starts, inspection and incident reports. If they’re drilling out of service, their data is saved on their devices and can be uploaded as soon as they get reception.

The drillers can also access all of the documentation they need to do the job from the app. Instead of packing rig tubs and printing out documents, Pat can push documents directly from the web portal to the drillers’ app, and update them remotely as required.

Finally, the Terra team are able to turn around drilling and billing data to the clients faster because there are fewer errors captured in the data. The CorePlan app has several controls built in to help minimise error, such as preventing overlapping drilling intervals and requiring time activities to equal shift time. There’s also an additional validation step where the drilling supervisor reviews and signs off the data on a daily basis before it goes to the client, and it can be provided to the client in any format they need, including a self-serve online portal.

Read the full case study to see how the Terra team are using CorePlan to save over 30 hours of admin time per week.

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CorePlan: more than a digital plod app

If you’re a drilling contractor looking for a solution that can do more than digitise plods, CorePlan can help.

CorePlan is a drilling data management platform that enables drilling contractors to ditch paper and spreadsheets and move to a fully integrated online system to fill plods, drill holes, bill clients and much more.

Discover CorePlan’s all-in-one digital platform for drilling contractors.

Can drillers actually go paperless at the rig?

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