When the Roster falls apart: Helping relieve the pressure on Survey Teams.

Most sites treat survey coverage as a head-count issue, but the real risk shows up when the head count becomes suddenly unavailable.

Last month, one of our customer's senior surveyors rang us late on a Friday. Two members of his three-person crew were knocked out by flu, and the timing couldn’t have been worse.

 His schedule was packed: there was a post-blast survey planned, he needed measure the ROM stockpiles for his weekly reporting, and the geotech team asked him (on his last shift already) for a "quick" aerial capture of a section of the highwall, all which needed to be delivered before Monday’s production meeting.

With only one seat in his ute and three jobs spread out over a site that takes forty minutes to cross, he was stuck choosing which department to disappoint first.

Luckily, that mine had unpacked an xBot the week before. Because the dock was already sitting near the blast area and connected to our remote operations centre, we took the load for him. Over the weekend our pilots ran the blast clearance flight, captured the stockpile volumes, and mapped the highwall. By Monday morning he dropped three finished reports into the shared drive and walked into the meeting feeling bullet-proof.

Later he told me it was the first time in fifteen years he wasn’t the bottleneck when the roster fell apart.

That’s the piece many operations miss. A lean survey team is always one sick day or flat tyre away from being labelled the cause of a production delay. When jobs are spread across a sprawling pit like those in the Bowen Basin, the risk only multiplies because travel time eats the contingency built into every schedule.

With an xBot drone docking solution sitting on site, operated from our WA and SA-based Remote Operating Centres seven days a week, the crew can temporarily lose people without losing capability. The site managers see the data on time, the enviro's get the imagery they need for their reports, and the surveyors get to focus on the parts of the job that still need boots on the ground.