Every mine site has a story about the bump test. A grader operator drives out because someone complained about the road yesterday, feels for himself whether it’s rough enough to worry about, and calls it good. That’s how haul road condition has been judged for decades: a 500-tonne haul truck problem, assessed from a light vehicle, on gut feel.
We built Decoda to close that gap. It’s why we’re proud to share that our Executive General Manager, George Spink, has been named to the Inside Small Business Top 50.
The recognition sits at the individual level, and that feels right. Awards like this are ultimately about the people steering a business through a genuinely hard problem, not just the technology it produces. George has led Decoda’s shift from a boutique consultancy assessing machinery data to a technology-first business, and that shift started with a simple question: what actually happens to a haul road once heavy trucks start running it thousands of times a day?
A new way to measure an old problem
Decoda Detect, the suite underneath our RockAware and BundAware products, replaces the bump test with truck-mounted LiDAR and AI that reads the road at half-metre intervals. That’s the difference between someone’s opinion of a haul road and an actual, continuous measurement of it. Sites running RockAware are extending tyre life by up to 20%, keeping thousands of tonnes of rubber and steel out of landfill each year, while pulling crews away from one of the most dangerous manual jobs on a mine site: tyre inspection. Tyre-related work carries a fatality risk far above most other tasks on site, and taking people out of that line of fire matters as much to us as the productivity gain does.
Under George’s leadership, that idea has scaled from a single-site trial to a business operating across multiple countries globally. Kal Tire proved the system holds its accuracy through sub-zero Canadian winters. TECWISE Latam marked our formal move into Chile and Brazil, two of the biggest open-pit mining markets anywhere. Each partnership has forced us to prove the same thing all over again in a new climate, on a new fleet, in front of a new team of sceptical operators.
Recognition that belongs to the team
None of that happens without the people behind it. This recognition belongs to the engineers who built a sensor system rugged enough for a mine site. It belongs to the maintenance crews on our customers’ operations who trust the data enough to act on it. It belongs to the partners who backed a genuinely new way of measuring an old problem, and to the interns and offshore developers who keep pushing the platform forward.
We’re grateful to Inside Small Business for including George among the leaders shaping small business in this country, and to every customer who let us prove the technology on their roads first, long before anyone was writing about it.
The bump test isn’t disappearing overnight. Old habits on a mine site rarely do. But every half-metre of data we capture is one more argument for a smarter way to run a haul road, and one more reason autonomous and electric fleets will have the well-measured ground they need to actually perform.
That work continues on every site we’re on, award or not. If you want to see what continuous haul road data looks like on your own operation, get in touch with our team today.
