How does CorePlan work with Leapfrog Geo and MX Deposit?

How CorePlan complements Leapfrog Geo

The basis of your drill program is your drill plan, so let’s start here.

Once you’ve designed your drill program in Leapfrog Geo, it’s time to prepare for drilling, and this is where CorePlan comes in.

CorePlan is where your entire team go to execute your drill program in the field, including your drill contractors.

The workflow begins by importing your Leapfrog drill plan into CorePlan as a new project. The drill plan file will populate your CorePlan project with all of the information contained in your drill plan. You can change the details of the drill plan at any time by re-uploading it from Leapfrog or editing it directly in CorePlan.

From here, exploration managers can tick off regulatory approvals before your fieldies go to work and complete all of the pre-drilling activities that get each hole ready to drill, eg pegging, clearing, sump digging etc. (You can add as many custom pre-drilling activities as you need).

Your team check off activities as completed in CorePlan as they go. They can add photos, documents and more to each hole so that there’s a full digital history to refer back to later. After completing all the activities at each hole, they are marked as ready to drill.

Meanwhile, you’ve hired contractors to execute the drilling. All of your drill contractors’ details go directly into CorePlan, including the conditions of the cost contract, for easy cost tracking and reconciliation.

During the active drilling phase, plod data in any format can be imported and matched to each drill hole and run against your drill plan and drillers’ cost contract in a few seconds at the end of each shift. This makes it easy to stay on top of costs each day and across the course of the drill program, and it means you don’t need to waste time messing around with spreadsheets or paper plods.

As you’re obtaining samples from the ground, your geos most likely enter the sampling data into MX Deposit or a similar database. When it’s time to start shipping those samples for analysis, CorePlan can help you get them to the lab faster. Geos can use CorePlan’s automation to generate sampling paperwork and alert the lab that the samples are on their way. There’s also a sample tracking feature that alerts you when your samples reach the lab, so you’re not left wondering where a specific batch is in the workflow. Plus, you can reconcile sampling costs within CorePlan and associate them with particular tenements for easy reporting.

Once the plods are imported, if the driller has marked a hole as complete (and this matches up with your drill plan), your field team can see that it’s time to take back over and complete all post-drilling activities like environmental rehab. This works the same way as the pre-drilling activity workflow and closes out the end-to-end lifecycle of the hole.

Where do I go to track drilling progress and access reports, cost and analytics related to the drill program?

CorePlan provides a more user-friendly way to run your drill program reporting compared to a traditional database.

As you populate your drill program with plod and activity data, CorePlan will produce daily reports to help guide your decision-making and answer questions about the drill program’s progress or performance. These reports can help you identify opportunities to cut costs or increase efficiencies.

For example, the drill production breakdown and rig time activity breakdown bring blockers like high standby time and breakdown time to the fore so that the necessary action can be taken in subsequent shifts.

Everything is neatly organised in tables, charts and colour-coded maps, making it much easier for everyone to work collaboratively compared to old-school spreadsheets, paper materials or a traditional database interface.

The data collection and validation process is centred around each hole of your drill program, so you only need to consult one place (CorePlan) throughout the drill program to find the entire history and documentation related to each individual hole, including who made changes, when they made them and why. This helps you create a full history for regulatory reporting, such as POW disturbance and environmental requirements, complete with photos.

If you need to run more complex or custom reporting, you can export your data anytime to software packages like Power BI or Tableau for additional slicin’ and dicin’.

Where does all the data collected in CorePlan go once you’ve completed your drill program?

Once your drill program is marked as complete in CorePlan, that’s your single source of truth for everything that happened on the ground during that drill program, including critical reporting details like:

How many shifts were run as part of the program - and who worked on them
How much you the entire program cost you
How much you spent by tenement, including drilling and other costs
The number of holes and metres drilled and the actual cost per metre against your original plan

and more.

You can access this anytime in CorePlan, but if you’re using a database, you can make a copy and file it in your database (usually MX Deposit if you’re using Seequent products). This can be done using a custom integration* or downloading your CorePlan data as a .csv file and uploading it directly.

You could upload this data to your database as often as you need during the drill program or at the end once the Exploration Manager has validated the final results. It’s up to you.

But why would you add CorePlan to your workflow if you’re already using MX Deposit?

Great question!

Whilst there is a small overlap between the two systems’ capabilities, the reasons you use tools like CorePlan and MX Deposit are quite different.

MX Deposit is for all the geological data you need to collect from the drill hole, including your logging and sampling data, whereas CorePlan is closer to a project management tool.

CorePlan is where you and your team manage and execute your day-to-day operations, including processes, progress, performance and costs, to ensure you’re tracking to plan.

CorePlan isn’t designed for geologging, core photography or geological modelling. It takes care of all the daily paperwork that comes with running a drill program so that your geos can spend more time working on all geology-related tasks.

Final thoughts

It takes a lot of time and effort to design the perfect drill plan in Leapfrog, so you want to make sure that the drilling is a success.

CorePlan can help you execute that drill plan to perfection by bringing your field team, geos and drillers together onto one platform that makes it easy to see exactly what’s happening on the ground.

By making daily drilling paperwork quick and easy, your geos can spend more time working on real geology work like logging and sampling that happens in Seequent products.

When it’s easy for everyone to collect great data in the field, you can be confident in the quality of the final numbers that go into your database or MX Deposit. This means that you can make better decisions and plan more effective drill programs in the future.

Learn more about CorePlan's drill program intelligence software package and how it can help exploration managers run better drill programs. Contact us today to see it in action!

‍

*At the time of writing, the two-way API capabilities of MX Deposit were not immediately clear. This will be updated when we have more information.

How does CorePlan work with Leapfrog Geo and MX Deposit?

Related Articles