Explore more blogs
Drilling Contractors

Should you hire another admin for your drilling business?

Megan Gammie
5 mins read
May 30, 2023

Is the level of administration required to run your drilling business getting out of hand? 

There are few things more rewarding than seeing your business grow. But a natural side-effect of growth is an increase in workload. 

Drilling contractor, Terra Drilling, experienced this first-hand, going from one to eight diamond rigs since launching the business in 2008. A fantastic achievement, but at the expense of owner-operators and husband and wife team, Pat and Jeremy (‘Toad’) Dowdall having to work overtime to stay on top of a never-ending mountain of paperwork.

Their question: was it possible to scale their workload, or would they need to continue to hire more admins for every new rig that was added to their fleet?

The Challenge

Pat and Toad’s workload was becoming unsustainable, but the answer was not going to be as simple as hiring another admin to help them in the office.

Terra Drilling is based in Kalgoorlie-Boulder, a small town with low unemployment, so finding the right person can be a challenge, let alone finding additional time to run interviews and training sessions, and manage performance on an ongoing basis.

It was difficult enough to find one person, so what would happen if they needed more help in the future? 

The Solution

Terra Drilling needed a scalable solution to their paperwork problems. A way of working that could help the team to get more work done with the same amount of resources. 

Pat knew that the answer was to go digital, but she couldn’t find the right fit for Terra’s needs. She didn’t just want digital plods, she wanted the entire business to be run digitally, and to never have to spend hours moving data between paper and spreadsheets again.

Then, she found CorePlan.

How Terra Drilling uses CorePlan to save 30 hours of admin time per week

Pat engaged the team at CorePlan to help digitise Terra’s entire operations and ditch data double-handling for good by implementing automation

Before CorePlan, Pat was having to transcribe paper plods into spreadsheets, then create further spreadsheets for reporting, client data-sharing and invoicing.  

Now, the drillers enter all their plods and forms directly into CorePlan using the CorePlan drilling app, and all Pat needs to do is quickly review the data in her web portal. Once the data is approved, CorePlan's automation pushes the verified data into reports, analytics, cost summaries for billing, and can even be automatically sent to the client for review.

The massive reduction in paperwork has been a complete 180 for the office team. "All things considered, it's saved us about 30 hours of admin time per week," says Pat. "It's tough to be a small business right now. It was so hard to find staff to give us a hand when we needed it. I'm so glad we implemented CorePlan when we did!"

Read the full case study.

CorePlan: paperwork automation for drilling contractors

If you’re a drilling contractor looking to focus on growing your business without growing the amount of time spent on paperwork, CorePlan can help.

CorePlan is a drilling data management platform that enables drilling contractors to ditch paper and spreadsheets and move to a fully integrated online system to fill plods, drill holes, bill clients and much more.

Discover CorePlan’s all-in-one digital platform for drilling contractors.