Digitizing drilling depths
2025年8月27日
Drill plans in underground mining are critical for ensuring efficiency, safety, and accuracy in mining operations. The drill plans specify the locations, depths, and diameters of holes to be drilled for the placement of explosives. This ensures controlled rock fragmentation during blasting, which minimizes waste and optimizes ore recovery.
To log the depths of drilled holes, Swedish mining company Boliden traditionally used a manual, paper-based solution that involved keeping track of paper documents and ensuring that they remained dry and clean in the mine environment.
To modernize the procedure, Boliden adopted the Drill Tracker solution from Epiroc. Drill Tracker provides operators with digital drill plan sheets on their smartphones, enabling them to track the progress of the drill plan execution.
Switching to a digital tool was a necessary step, according to Emma Bjur, Head of Section Project Steering Mine at Boliden Garpenberg.
Why did you switch to a digital solution for logging drill results?
You chose to implement Epiroc Drill Tracker. What are the major advantages of this solution?
"It fits well into the Boliden ecosystem. Now, the operators report drill results in an app on their smartphones, eliminating the problems of lost, damaged or illegible aperwork. The app is easy to work with. It saves time and labor and improves the quality of the results. We’re provided with a near real-time remote overview of the drilling progress, which increases transparency and allows for higher accuracy in planning. We also get better traceability, as it's easy to review past drilling data and identify issues"
Do you have any advice for other mines looking to switch to a digital drill tracking solution?
“Involve the operators at an early stage, inventory their needs, and find out how you can make their work easier. It’s important to demonstrate that introducing a new solution solves an actual problem. Also, work closely with the developers to solve issues early in the implementation process.”
