What is daily drilling report software for drilling contractors and who uses it?

Daily drilling report ("DDR" or "plod") software provides a comprehensive solution for capturing and managing drill plods in two simple steps.

Firstly, drillers use a digital plod form or digital plod app in the field to replace paper-based plods.

Secondly, the digital plod is uploaded to a web portal where drilling managers can easily edit and share the data with their exploration clients

In addition to facilitating efficient plod data capture, DDR software often includes basic reporting and analytics features that enable managers to keep track of important metrics such as the number of plods captured and metres drilled.

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What are the benefits of daily drilling report software?

Digitised drilling data

Digitising your drilling data saves your admin team a lot of time transferring data from paper plods into a spreadsheet or other kind of system. This means that you can review, analyse and share the data with your clients much faster.

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All of your drilling data in the same format

Drilling contractors have to collect data for many clients. This can create difficulties when it comes time to bring that data all together into your system because of inconsistent formatting. Daily drilling report software can help make your admin’s lives easier by providing a consistent format for data, whilst still allowing some customisation so that you’re able to meet your client’s needs in the field.

By having the data in a consistent format in the first instance, it becomes much easier and faster to compare performance and costs from different rigs, projects and crews.

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A better client service

The expectations of your exploration clients are rapidly changing as the industry shifts towards being more data-driven. Growing numbers of exploration companies are not willing to accept paper plods because it wastes their geologists time decoding handwriting and transcribing the data, and there’s more room for human error without the inbuilt checks and balances that are found in drilling software.

From a client’s perspective, using drilling software like daily drilling report software can inspire more confidence in the data and the bill they receive at the end of the month.

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What are the limitations of daily drilling report software?

The benefits finish at the plod

Unfortunately, daily drilling report software is a highly specialised product, so drilling contractors will still need to purchase a range of other tools to create a complete digital workflow.

Drilling contractors that choose to use only daily drilling report software are often stuck having to manually run reports, generate invoices and analyse performance using other types of software or even Excel spreadsheets.

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Data is shared with clients via PDF

With the move to more data-driven exploration, clients' data needs are shifting. One limitation with some daily drilling report software on the market is that the data can often only be shared in a PDF format.

The problem with supplying clients with PDFs is that they want access to the raw data to be able to run their analyses quickly and match it up against their drill hole metadata. It also makes it difficult to use the data in the future when it’s locked into a pdf, so they have to transcribe it into another format to be able to use it, but summary PDF data leaves behind the nitty-gritty details they need to better understand the hole.

Finally, there’s usually no audit trail of changes in a PDF, making it hard to validate the data and verify the chain of custody that it’s passed through.

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Going beyond the digital plod?

In the 2010s, daily drilling report software was groundbreaking in the drilling industry. But today, many drilling contractors are looking for end-to-end solutions to digitise more than just their plod data. They want to run their entire drilling businesses in a central digital workspace and digitise their entire operations, including pre-starts, take 5s, inspections, incidents, timesheets and rig schedules. They also want to be able to impress their clients by sharing data with them in flexible formats like .csv files - or even dedicated client portals.

Terra Drilling was one of them, choosing to bypass daily drilling report software and start their journey with a fully integrated drilling data management platform.

Read their story here.

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More types of drilling software

Daily drilling report software is just one of many new types of drilling software being adopted by drilling contractors.

Our looks at understanding drilling software all the different types of drilling software on the market, including the key features, benefits and what leading drilling contractors servicing the mining and minerals industry are doing in this space.

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Read the Guide.

Download the checklist here

Daily drilling report software for drilling contractors

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