Are you tired of spending hours poring over spreadsheets to calculate your cost per metre? How confident are you that your drilling spend is translating into metres drilled? And do you know your burn rate based on today’s drilling data - not last week's?

As a Junior exploration company, you need to keep your finger on the pulse of the drill program to avoid running out of cash before you make that all-important hit. Unlike the top end of town, you don’t have the safety of a producing mine to fall back on. Meanwhile, you need to dig deeper and spend more money to make a discovery.

With burn rate being so critical to success, can you really afford to rely on spreadsheets to make sure that you’re hitting your metre and cost targets?

This was a question that Julian Woodcock, Managing Director of Junior Exploration company, Viking Mines had about his drill programs.

And here’s how he found the answer.

The Challenge

Like many Junior explorers, Viking Mines were running their operations using a combination of spreadsheets and pen-and-paper processes.

The team could capture the required data, but they couldn’t keep up with the speed of the rig, and this was delaying Julian’s ability to be able to make time-sensitive decisions about the drill program. Decisions that could have a direct impact on Viking’s bottom line by directing cash to better prospects.

The Solution

Viking Mines needed a faster way to capture, process and interpret drilling data so that they could adjust their drill program based on what was happening in the field in real time.

They needed a solution that would be fast, but also highly accurate, so Julian could be confident that he was making the right decisions.

It also needed to fit within a strict budget so that it didn’t impede their ability to drill more holes.

How Viking Mines used CorePlan to do this - and more

Viking’s budget didn’t allow Julian enough cash to hire more geologists to wrangle the data, but it did allow him the necessary funds to invest in plod automation to handle this process for him at the speed of the rig - and enable his existing geology team to focus on discovery.

Plod automation is a feature found exclusively in CorePlan’s drill program management software. It allows geologists to import any plod from any contractor in any format into a central drilling data management platform in seconds. From here, a series of reports, analytics, cost breakdowns and more are automatically generated based on the drilling contractor’s data so that Julian can instantly see exactly what was drilled today and how much it cost them.

This gave him the real-time insights he needed to be able to make changes to the drill program as soon as the next shift, opening the door to finding opportunities that could save valuable resources and improve efficiencies.

Read the full case study.

CorePlan: a digital tool that replaces spreadsheets for Junior exploration teams

The stakes are high for Junior explorers, and yet many of them are stuck using low-quality tools that make it difficult for them to accurately calculate drilling costs and translate dollars spent into metres drilled.

It doesn’t have to be this way, and it shouldn’t have to break your budget either.

Enter CorePlan: a digital tool that exploration teams of all sizes to unlock the power of their drilling data by using powerful automation to save time and calculate drilling spend at the speed of the rig.
Discover CorePlan’s drill program management software for Junior explorers.

Download the checklist here

CorePlan vs Krux: What's the difference?

Explore powerful features that outperform Krux.

Click here

Junior Explorers: don’t settle for spreadsheets!

Download the checklist here

Related Articles