Streamline Inventory Management with Customized Reporting for Stockpiles

For years, we’ve collaborated with our customers in the mining and aggregates industries to improve our drone surveying platform to better fit their needs. From our conversations—and our 2020 survey of earthwork professionals—we know how critical stockpile reporting and inventory management is to their operations. 

In fact, 48% of respondents listed “material moved” as the most important metric when judging operational efficiency. 

Propeller has always offered the ability to quickly gather highly accurate stockpile measurements for use in inventory management. And today, we’re making the process of leveraging that data much easier:  

Our newly designed inventory reporting feature for stockpiles make it simple for mine and quarry managers, landfill operators, and construction managers who regularly deal with stockpiled material to share the most relevant information about their inventory stockpiles in an easy-to-understand format. 

With customizable inventory reports for stockpiles, you can give everyone—from production supervisors on site to auditors in the head office— the data they need to make mission-critical decisions faster.

Customize your Reporting to include only the most relevant information   

Inventory reporting for stockpiles lets Propeller Platform users generate PDFs and CSVs with only the information they want to include. More control and flexibility in what gets included means users can generate reports more specific to individual workers’ needs. 

For instance, financial record-keepers probably don’t need to know the density of a stockpile. As long as they have the tonnage and dollar amount, they can keep the books straight. Being able to exclude extraneous information from your inventory report means less sorting through irrelevant metrics for everyone involved. Managers, engineers, estimators, and others in your organization will all benefit.  

This goes for both those consulting PDFs at a glance, and anyone looking to export the data. Previously, quarry and mine managers had to spend hours cleaning up the exported CSV, manually merging it with additional data, and reformatting it to work with their other reporting systems. 

Now, generating a CSV with the exact data you need just takes a few clicks. Just select the relevant stockpiles, check a few boxes, and hit ‘Create Report.’

The benefits of streamlined, specialized reporting

Smarter planning

Mine and quarry managers use stockpile reports to communicate how much stock they have and how much has been moved since the previous survey. This is information is critical for financial forecasting, resource planning, and supply chain management. All require reliable, accurate stockpile data to be done effectively. 

Propeller’s inventory reporting for stockpiles make it easy for everyone in the organization to get the data they need. Anyone—not just surveying and GIS professionals—can jump into the platform and generate a report. When you don’t have to rely on a single user with specialized platform training to pull inventory data, you can get everything else done faster. 

See how Nevada Gold Mines’ chief surveyor is using daily drone data to manage stockpiles on a 40-mile mining site.

Better reconciliation

For efficient mining and aggregate site management, inventory needs to be carefully measured at every stage of the process. Of course, the complexity of day-to-day operations means the numbers rarely line up from one phase to the next. 

It’s every mining and aggregate operation’s goal to minimize discrepancies between:   

• actual on-the-ground quantities
• records of materials produced (crushed rock coming off conveyors)
• material leaving the site

To accomplish this, our customers in these industries typically fly their sites once a month. Propeller’s PPK workflow makes it easy to survey sites with a drone and gather data with 1/10 in (3 cm) accuracy tolerance. 

With accurate, dependable stockpile volumes at their fingertips, financial record keepers are better able to reconcile actual and reported quantities of material when it comes time for an audit. Propeller’s new report for stockpiles simplifies the reconciliation process by making it possible to package the data in a more digestible, usable format. 

Going beyond stockpile reporting with unmatched drone surveying accuracy 

Surveying stockpiles with drones is significantly faster and less obtrusive to daily processes than traditional base-and-rover methods. In fact, everything we do at Propeller is intended to make surveying workflows—and, thus, all earthwork operations—more efficient.   

However, the benefits of optimizing reporting and reconciliation operations aren’t isolated. We’ve found that, once our customers settle into a drone surveying and reporting workflow, they have more flexibility to start leveraging the highly accurate maps and models in the Propeller Platform for higher-value in-pit analysis, like comparing surveys to mine-plan designs.

Having more relevant reporting early on helps to streamline every stage of a site’s lifecycle, including the reclamation process. In short, it’s not hard to see the value accurate stockpile measurements and smarter inventory reporting brings to every corner of a mining or aggregate business.

Want to hear how else drone surveying can optimize your operations? Read our Drones for Mining and Drones for Aggregates beginner’s guides.