How to scale your exploration project without compromising on data quality and operational performance

Exploration Managers and Senior Geos: are you using paper and spreadsheets to manage your drill plods? 

You might have wondered how sustainable this process would be if you suddenly struck mineralisation. Could you keep up this way of working if you suddenly needed to double or triple your drill production?

Sure, this sounds like an unlikely scenario. One that you wouldn’t waste time thinking about until it happened. 

But it’s precisely what happened to the team at Chalice Mining, who struck gold on their very first drill hole at Gonneville.

A team that went from having one drill rig to multiple rigs and triple the number of holes from the original plan, all in just a few weeks.

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The Challenge

Chalice's ‘one hit wonder’ was exciting, but not long after, the stress started to creep into the project. Virtually overnight, they needed to bring on multiple rig types and contractors. Soon, their spreadsheet system for tracking drill production and costs struggled to keep up with the rigs’ speed.

A system that should have worked with a single rig became increasingly inefficient, time-consuming and the cause of delays in consolidating valuable data, tracking progress, building reports and keeping on top of drilling expenditure.

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The Solution

Chalice’s management could see that their existing solution no longer worked for the team. It was running them ragged trying to maintain the same high data standards they set out with for the one rig across multiple rigs. 

They needed a better way to manage their drill program and redirect valuable geology time away from paperwork and back to geology. 

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How Chalice Mining used CorePlan to do this - and more

The Chalice team implemented CorePlan to automate and streamline their drill plod management processes and gain big picture visibility into their operational performance across multiple contractors.

Using CorePlan’s plod automation, Chalice's geologists can import all their drill plods in any format and from any contractor directly into their drill program management portal to save time usually spent reformatting and transcribing data. The data is automatically run against each driller’s rate schedule and the drill plan to ensure that costs are tracked accurately and that drill holes comply with project goals.

Once the data is approved by Chalice's geos, the team can instantly access detailed insights into drilling performance and costs, including how each rig and crew is contributing to the overall result.

This means the team are no longer having to manually calculate costs, run reports and wrangle plod data, and this valuable time and focus is back where it belongs: on discovery.

Read the full case study.

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CorePlan: the easy way to scale your drill program without sacrificing data quality and performance

If you need to expand your drill program but don’t want to lose the level of visibility and control you’re accustomed to with a single rig, CorePlan can help.

CorePlan is a digital tool that exploration teams of all sizes use to plan, manage and execute drill programs in one place. It brings the entire team together to collaborate in real-time and empowers decision-makers to make data-driven decisions.

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