How Impact Drilling Services modernised their operations with CorePlan

Impact Drilling Services is a boutique drilling company founded in late 2020 by Managing Director Ronnie Hill, with a focus on providing RC and Aircore drilling services to the mining industry. Ronnie's business was one of the pioneers in adopting a modern drilling operations software platform to better serve their customers.

Impact Drilling's challenge

Starting a new business venture can be overwhelming and allocating limited resources to focus on manual processes instead of automation is time-consuming. 

Business Development Manager, James Flain, had come on board to help Ronnie run and grow the business. As with any business at the early stage, the need for digitisation and automation, whilst nice, was not necessary. But, with an increase in clients and workload, the need to move away from pen and paper came into focus. 

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James found himself spending more and more of his time manually entering plods into spreadsheets, moving back and forth to make corrections and burning through hours organising data to present to clients.

It was time to find a digital plod tool to reduce time wasted and decrease errors so that James could focus on more important areas of the business.

A digital tool to grow the business

James used CorePlan as his tool of choice to solve this growing business problem.

CorePlan is a digital operations platform for mineral exploration and exploration drilling companies that want to move away from paper, spreadsheets or clunky enterprise systems to a streamlined workflow.

For drillers, CorePlan is the only tool they need to collect and approve drilling data, share usable data with clients, reconcile drilling costs against contracts and invoice clients. As the drilling data lives in the cloud, it is safe, secure and makes real-time reporting extremely easy.

• CorePlan offers an out-of-the-box turnkey solution.
• Flexible, customisable and designed for a drilling company’s end-to-end workflow.
• Easy-to-use tablet and mobile app, designed specifically for drillers in the field where they may not have an internet connection.
• Lower cost solution compared to alternatives.
• One platform to run drill data capture, conduct reporting, manage safety reporting, hold important safety policies, manage client invoicing and share data easily with clients.

What does Impact Drilling Services new workflow look like?

The workflow starts at the rig. Impact’s drillers fill out the plod form using the CorePlan mobile app during their shifts. This captures everything from actual hole location, drilling intervals, chargeable and non-chargeables, equipment and staff present. This is in addition to any pre-starts, incidents, and inspections. Need to get the client to sign off on a plod? That can also be done using CorePlan.

CorePlan’s mobile and tablet app syncs with the cloud, allowing the office team to receive submissions immediately. 

In the office, there’s no need to manually enter information from paper plods to spreadsheets, generate additional PDFs or spreadsheets or compile daily shift reports. Instead, James reviews and approves the submissions by logging into CorePlan. Once approved, these daily drill reports are shared with clients using csv exports via email.

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CorePlan gives James multiple real-time reports to track drill performance by client, rig and costs. This allows him to keep an eye on performance or jump in and optimise processes.

Edits can also be accomplished without having to update multiple spreadsheets, reports and emails. All these changes are logged for later auditing if necessary.

Additionally, CorePlan’s integration with MYOB and Xero allows for effortless generation of invoices and billing. 

Overall, Impact Drilling Services are using CorePlan to effectively and efficiently to run their entire end-to-end operations, from capturing data at the rig, approvals, sharing data and invoicing, all in one place. 

An unexpected impact 

Historically, one of the problems exploration companies experience is getting plods from drillers on time. 

Usually, the plods are scanned copies of error-prone paper plods or PDFs from other systems that need to be digitised from the client’s end. This impacts the client as they do not have access to the information required to make impromptu decisions. The time spent manually entering plods is costly. 

Impact Drilling’s professionalism has instantly been lifted by establishing a new, more efficient workflow to better serve their clients. Their clients love the transparency and instant sharing of information they need.

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“CorePlan has changed the way we operate. For a startup business like us, just the ability to go to a client meeting and say:  “This is everything from plod data to our safety management” has been extremely powerful. Our position and professionalism against competitors has been instantly lifted.” - James

The results

By digitising plods, safety data and cost reconciliation, Impact Drilling Services are able to save time and resources in both the office and on-site. Drillers are happy to use the CorePlan tablet to log their plods easily without frustration and plods are being submitted at the end of the shift quickly.

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“CorePlan has almost immediately cut my work in half, with only part of the platform being implemented, allowing me to focus on strategy and business growth.” - James

“We didn't realise the true benefit of CorePlan until we rolled it out. The platform has helped us instantly modernise our business, moving from pen and paper to a full digital workflow that has streamlined extremely complex processes, even during a new business startup.” - James

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