Junior explorers: can you confidently say that you know exactly how much today’s drilling has cost you and why? Do you have the tools you need to understand your burn rate in real-time so that you can pivot the drill program to meet your metre target without going over budget?

Like many explorers, Maronan Metals were manually entering plods into spreadsheets and using Microsoft Excel to calculate their burn rate and plan future drilling.

And it worked…. kind of.

That is, until they had a year and a half’s worth of drilling that had to be manually planned and budgeted for.

The Challenge

Running manual, spreadsheet-based burn rate calculations was making it difficult to keep up with fluctuating drilling costs and a constantly moving cost per metre. And, whenever Maronan needed to query data with the drillers or an invoice was revised, they were forced to go back to the drawing board to modify data and recalculate costs.

A big strain on their time as a small team of three staff.

Plus, it created uncertainty when trying to budget for the next iteration of drilling. Changes to the drilling invoice could impact on next month’s planned drilling spend, forcing them to spend valuable time and energy reorganising the program.

The Solution

Maronan Metals needed a way to be able to easily stay on top of their cost per metre, and gain greater oversight into drilling costs to avoid end-of-the-month turmoil. This way, they could gain more certainty, save precious time and go about their planning with confidence.

How Maronan Metals uses CorePlan to do this - and more

Maronan Metals’ Exploration Manager, Andrew Barker, approached CorePlan to automate drilling data entry and cost calculation.

Using CorePlan’s plod automation, Andrew can easily import his daily drilling reports at the end of each shift, have the data instantly run against his drillers’ rate schedule, and get a real-time view into drilling costs and performance. Plus, he can instantly get access to his real-time cost per metre and projected costs to see exactly how the drill program is tracking according to plan.

This instantly saves Andrew hours of manual data manipulation and calculation, so he can spend more time actioning the insights that were previously hidden in the data and run a more responsive drill program.

Read the full case study.

CorePlan: a digital tool that gives Juniors instant visibility into burn rate

CorePlan’s drill program management software is a cloud-based tool for exploration teams of all sizes who want to run drill programs on time and on (or under!) budget. See how CorePlan can help your exploration team to manage your burn rate and other aspects of your field operations.

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CorePlan vs Krux: What's the difference?

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How Maronan Metals monitors their Junior exploration burn rate in real time

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