The Challenge

After striking mineralisation on the first drill hole of their Gonneville drill program, Chalice needed to rapidly scale their drilling operations from one rig and one contractor to multiple drill rigs and contractors.

Each contractor supplied Chalice with daily drilling reports (plods) in different formats, including paper, spreadsheets and digital. This created a backlog in data processing because their geos had to manually copy the data from all these formats into their master spreadsheet format.

Because of the backlog, a growing amount of valuable field time was being spent on screens, and the team couldn’t make decisions at the speed of the drilling. There was also a growing risk of accidental human error due to manual data handling.

‍

The Solution

Chalice needed a way to speed up this time-consuming and error-prone process so that their geologists could return to the field where they belonged.

Their goal was to bring all of the data into a centralised drilling data hub that would enable the team to make accurate decisions at the rig's speed. But the solution also needed to be compatible with multiple drilling types (diamond core, RC and aircore) and data formats (paper, spreadsheet and digital plods).

‍

How Chalice Mining used CorePlan to do this in one simple step

Before using CorePlan, like most exploration geologists, Chalice’s geos had to:

transcribe data in multiple formats into a new spreadsheet
manually review the spreadsheet for errors
build macros to be able to analyse performance and calculate costs
create a new report summarising performance
compare plod and cost data against the drilling invoice manually
manually update the relevant data if there were errors
save multiple versions of the document to a shared drive for upload into the database

….and so on.

‍

Now, the Chalice team uses CorePlan to complete all these processes with one easy step.

Geo's import drill plods from any contractor in any format directly into CorePlan, where the data is centralised and standardised within seconds. All other required processes, like performance and cost reporting, are instantly completed using automation.

All the geologists need to do is take a few moments to approve or reject the plod, and the rest of the process is taken care of.

The result?

“We have 5 or 6 of our geology team using CorePlan. It saves us around 8 to 10 hours of site time every week.” - Matthew Demmer, Lead Geologist at Chalice Mining

Read the full case study.

‍

CorePlan: plod automation - and more

If you want to get your geos out of the office and into the field, CorePlan can help.

CorePlan is a digital tool that exploration teams of all sizes use to automate drill program paperwork so that they can spend more time on geology.

Discover CorePlan’s drill program management software for exploration teams.

Download the checklist here

Exploration Teams

Beyond the Geological Database: The Rise of Specialised Drilling Software

Discover why traditional geological databases fall short for drilling operations and explore the benefits of specialised drilling software platforms. Learn about top solutions like CorePlan, Krux Analytics, and more to enhance productivity, optimise costs, and drive data-driven decisions in the mining industry.

Exploration Teams

Drilling cost software: Get more out of your exploration drilling budget

Turn dollars into metres with drilling cost software. Optimise drill program spend and make better drilling cost estimates.

Exploration Teams

Drilling planning software for exploration managers explained: A quick guide for program success

Set your team up for success using drill program planning software to plan, execute and optimise your drilling campaigns.

How to stop wrangling drill contractor data in one easy step

Download the checklist here

Related Articles