One of the bonuses of new technology is its ability to monitor, track and even guide us in our daily lives. Who remembers the skill of flicking furiously through an street directory of a city to try and pilot yourself from one destination to the next? This skill has now been superseded by GPS systems like Google Maps that can bark orders, assess routes and quickly change our destination on the fly.
Yet when I started life as a humble survey assistant I could only have dreamed of such a free service! Instead it was the senior surveyor doing the barking, as I tried to keep us heading in the right direction to our job site!! It was a skill I picked up in time but many wrong turns and head scratches happened before I learnt the skill of map reading.
In the underground environment one of the biggest issues against any schedule or weekly plan can be “mining off design”. This could be via blasting a huge stope poorly and loosing days trucking diluted ore to the surface. Another problem area revolves around correctly mining horizontal or jumbo development. If operators do not have correct training or experience they can mine off design, drifting away from the proposed design and causing costly rework. They only receive training for a few months and then their barking supervisors leaves them to it!
Jo Martyr and the team at MineOps have developed a simple yet effective app for the jumbo operators. This allows them to input the offsets from the survey plans that operators reference and precisely align their drill steels at the face. The “dark art” of taking advances with the jumbo can have the guess work out of the equation. Lets call it the “Google Maps for the modern jumbo operator”.
This adds value for the jumbo operator, as they will no longer been given a pineapple by their foreman for going off line! With Smart Cut and enough brown nosing they can possibly become the A grade operator that every project needs on the front line. The cost saving for mining business owners comes from better adherence to the rolling weekly/monthly schedule due to reduced rework from the jumbo advances on site.
Smart Cut for Android: Google Play Store Link
Smart Cut for Apple: App Store Link
MineOps Smart Cut is a simple to use app that runs on both Apple and Android devices, this could be a phone or tablet. With multiple projects now adopting tablets this and the broader MineOps underground mining suite of apps could be worth checking out.
Thanks to Jo and her team for the early mentorship in helping me start this website and side project.
