Underground Hardrock
Operations Planning & Execution Software
Drive Efficiency and Control in High-Complexity Underground Hardrock Operations
Underground hardrock mining presents unique challenges due to its complex geological conditions, variable ore bodies, and reliance on precise coordination between crews, equipment, and infrastructure. Operations often struggle with fragmented planning, limited real-time visibility, and inefficient task execution, leading to lost production, increased costs, and safety risks.
Commit Works provides a structured and connected approach to short-term operational planning and frontline execution, ensuring underground hardrock mines operate with greater efficiency, visibility, and control.
Challenges
Manual and Disconnected Processes
Underground hardrock mining relies on intricate scheduling across multiple levels, but many operations still depend on spreadsheets, whiteboards, and paper-based plans. This lack of digital integration leads to outdated information, miscommunication between shifts, and inefficient resource allocation. The result is costly delays, bottlenecks in production, and safety risks from uncoordinated activities.
Lack of Operational Visibility
Hardrock mines operate in confined, unpredictable environments where maintaining visibility across all headings, stopes, and development areas is critical. However, poor data capture and disconnected planning systems make it difficult to track progress, identify deviations from the plan, and proactively manage risks. Without a single source of truth, delays, misalignment, and safety issues compound.
Bottlenecks in Development and Production Sequences
Delays in drilling, blasting, and mucking cycles create production bottlenecks that ripple through the entire operation. A lack of coordination between shift teams, poor real-time tracking of activities, and misalignment of drilling and haulage schedules result in underutilized equipment and lost production. These inefficiencies make it challenging to meet daily, weekly, and monthly production targets.
Ineffective Resource Utilization
Underground hardrock mines require careful coordination of personnel, equipment, and material movements, yet manual planning often leads to underutilized or overburdened resources. Equipment sits idle due to scheduling conflicts, key personnel are deployed inefficiently, and material logistics are reactive rather than planned. This leads to unnecessary downtime, increased operational costs, and avoidable delays.
Solution
Integrated Operations Planning & Execution
Our software suite provides a unified, digital approach to managing underground hardrock mining operations, from short-term planning down to shift-level execution. Instead of relying on fragmented tools like spreadsheets and whiteboards, our platform creates a connected environment where all planning, execution, and real-time adjustments are centralized in one place.
By digitizing shift plans and linking tasks with specific headings, equipment, and personnel, our software enables mine managers, shift supervisors, and planners to maintain clarity over operations and improve coordination across drilling, blasting, mucking, and haulage activities. This reduces miscommunication, minimizes downtime, and ensures that operational execution is aligned with production goals—whether in cut-and-fill, sublevel stoping, or block caving operations.
Our software empowers planners and shift supervisors to adjust plans dynamically based on actual conditions underground. Unlike traditional manual systems, where updates are slow or non-existent, our platform allows teams to integrate real-time data from the heading, ensuring that development, production, and maintenance teams are working with the latest information. This capability is critical in underground hardrock mining, where geological variations, equipment breakdowns, and production delays require continuous short-term adjustments.
Dynamic Resource Management
Our software provides an integrated view of personnel, equipment, and materials, allowing supervisors, schedulers, and planners to dynamically allocate resources across tasks and locations based on current operational needs. In hardrock mining, delays in drilling, charging, or mucking cycles can significantly impact production efficiency. Our software ensures that resources are deployed optimally, helping mines maintain operational momentum.
For operations using sublevel stoping or cut-and-fill methods, our software enables supervisors to quickly reassign resources to address bottlenecks—whether it’s ensuring drilling rigs are ready for the next cycle, optimizing loader availability, or repositioning haul trucks for material handling. By providing real-time insights into equipment status, task progress, and workforce allocation, our software allows teams to make data-driven decisions during the shift, ensuring efficient use of loaders, jumbos, bolters, and haulage fleets.
In deep, high-stress environments such as block caving, maintaining a well-coordinated extraction sequence is critical. Our platform ensures that all teams—development, production, ground support, and maintenance—operate in sync, reducing the risk of misalignment that can lead to cave propagation issues or drawpoint congestion.
Real-Time Data Utilization and Adaptive Execution
Success in underground hardrock mining depends on the ability to respond quickly to changing conditions. Our software serves as the central data repository for tracking production progress, equipment status, and task completion, ensuring that every team member has access to the most up-to-date information.
As shift crews execute tasks, they log progress and deviations in the system, providing real-time feedback to planners and supervisors. This allows shift supervisors to adapt shift plans based on actual performance, ensuring better cycle times, optimized drilling sequences, and reduced idle time for critical equipment.
For example, if drilling progress is slower than planned due to unexpected ground conditions, shift supervisors can immediately adjust work sequences and reallocate resources. Similarly, if mucking operations are falling behind due to loader unavailability, the system helps supervisors reassign alternate equipment or adjust haulage plans to maintain production flow.
By bridging the gap between planning and execution, our software helps mines mitigate delays, optimize development cycles, and ensure production stays on track despite operational variability.
Enhanced Safety and Compliance
Underground hardrock mining involves high-risk activities such as ground control, ventilation management, and controlled blasting, all of which require strict adherence to safety protocols. Our software integrates safety checklists, competency tracking, and compliance monitoring into daily shift planning, ensuring that only qualified personnel perform high-risk tasks.
For example, if a jumbo operator needs specific certifications for ground support installations, the system ensures that only certified personnel are assigned to that task. Similarly, if a heading requires re-entry clearance after a blast, the software helps teams coordinate clearance times and ensure compliance before work resumes.
By embedding safety protocols directly into shift plans, our software enables mining operations to reduce risk exposure, maintain compliance, and ensure that safety-critical tasks are never overlooked. Additionally, the system allows supervisors to track equipment status and flag maintenance needs, preventing failures that could compromise both safety and productivity.
Cross-Functional Collaboration
Our platform fosters seamless collaboration between mining, engineering, and operations teams, ensuring that production, maintenance, and ground support crews work from a single, shared source of truth. With multi-user logins and real-time collaboration tools, shift supervisors and managers can make decisions faster, resolve conflicts proactively, and align tasks across departments to prevent delays.
For example, if a planned stope backfill schedule conflicts with ongoing mucking operations, the software enables teams to identify the issue early and adjust schedules accordingly—minimizing downtime and preventing unnecessary rework.
This integrated work management approach enhances communication across teams, enabling underground hardrock mines to operate with greater efficiency, fewer disruptions, and improved operational continuity.
Continuous Improvement & Feedback Cycles
Our software enables mines to capture and analyze operational data across shifts, helping planners, engineers, and superintendents identify trends, refine workflows, and continuously improve performance.
By capturing detailed shift data—including drilling advance rates, cycle times, equipment utilization, and task completion metrics—our platform enables teams to make informed decisions about resource allocation, process improvements, and bottleneck resolution.
For example, if delays in drilling and charging cycles consistently impact development progress, the system allows teams to pinpoint recurring issues and adjust planning strategies to mitigate them. Similarly, if equipment utilization data highlights inefficiencies in loader or haul truck deployment, mines can adjust fleet scheduling to improve overall efficiency.
This data-driven approach ensures that underground hardrock mines are continuously refining their operational strategies, driving higher productivity, lower costs, and better overall performance over time.
Take Control of Your Underground Hardrock Operations
Achieve greater efficiency, visibility, and productivity with a structured planning and execution system designed for the unique challenges of underground hardrock mining.
