Initiatives to lower the cost per tonne in the load and haul function leads to a focus on shovel swing times or payload stats. While these are critical metrics, a significant productivity constraint often goes unnoticed: the haul road.
When a haul circuit is compromised by poor road conditions, it triggers a costly domino effect. Fuel burn spikes, mechanical wear increases, and safety risks rise. To significantly improve haul circuit productivity, the road must be treated as a high-value asset rather than just a transit path.
The Cost of Road Degradations
A haul road impacted by spillage or road degradation is a direct drain on the bottom line. Encountering a hazard or undulation destroys momentum and extends cycle times. Even more damaging are the hazards that go undetected — sharp rocks that cause rapid tyre deflation or small cuts and bruising that lead to the slow, invisible deterioration of tyre integrity. Over months, this cumulative damage manifests as mechanical separation or eventual tyre failure: a quiet but serious killer of both tyres and production performance. Severe corrugations compound this by fatiguing a truck’s chassis and suspension over time.
Traditional road inspections are often subjective and reactive. By the time a problem is reported via radio, the bottleneck is already impacting production. Decoda addresses this with RockAware, a real-time detection system that identifies road hazards as they occur. By identifying spillage before it damages a tyre or forces a fleet-wide slowdown, mines can maintain a clean circuit that supports consistent haulage speeds.
Compliance Without the Production Hit
Safety and productivity both have an interest in bund wall compliance. Verifying that safety bunds meet height and integrity standards often requires sending a light vehicle out to survey the bund. This process is slow and introduces high-risk interactions between small vehicles and heavy haulage fleets.
If a bund is non-compliant, the entire section becomes a liability. By using BundAware, the system monitors bund height compliance automatically while the fleet remains in motion. This transforms a mandatory safety check into a continuous data stream, ensuring the circuit remains compliant and production stays on track without manual checks.
Solving the Mystery Behind Cycle Time Changes
It is common for a dispatcher to see unexpected cycle time differences across trucks or shifts without a clear indication of what caused them. Without granular data, it is difficult to determine if the issue stems from mechanical performance, operator behaviour, or localised road degradation.
Often, the default response is to deploy a grader to the entire circuit, which is an inefficient use of equipment and labour. This is where Haul Detect provides a digitised, prioritised advantage. Using its on board processor and IMU unit, the system measures road undulations, G force events and speed to understand how the machine is moving across the circuit.
This data links machine performance directly to GPS-located road conditions to find the exact cause of a slowdown. Instead of broad, unnecessary maintenance, teams can identify a specific stretch of road that requires attention. This allows for targeted grading and spot repairs, ensuring resources are used precisely where they will most effectively clear the bottleneck.
A Faster, More Efficient Circuit
Maximising haul circuit productivity is not about pushing machines beyond their limits; it is about removing the obstacles that force them to slow down. By moving away from reactive road maintenance and utilising real-time data, operations can reduce fuel burn, extend component life, and hit production targets more consistently.
When the road is no longer a bottleneck, the fleet is finally able to perform at its designed capacity.
