Case study
Driving accuracy and winning jobs with digital drill workflows
By building a fully connected digital workflow from aerial survey and blast design through GNSS-guided drilling, Donnelly Blasting Services (DBS) has boosted blast quality, raised productivity and gained a clear competitive edge in winning and delivering complex quarry drilling projects.
Key achievements
- Seamless data handover
- Reduced errors and duplicate work
- Improved productivity across disciplines
- Strengthened quality and compliance
Solutions leveraged
- Trimble® Business Center (TBC) office software (aerial survey)
- Trimble R750, Trimble R780 GNSS systems and SPS855 base stations
Summary
With the GNSS and the workflow, we're winning jobs now that we would never have won 10 years ago.
Dan Donnelly Production manager at Donnelly Blasting Services (DBS)
Background
Improvements, from labor efficiency to blast quality
From its facility in Jimboomba, Queensland, Australia, family-owned Donnelly Blasting Services (DBS) self-performs all quarry operations, including surveying, mark-out, blast design, drilling, shotfiring and site monitoring, with a fleet of roughly 20 drill rigs and about 30 staff.
Technology enables the operation to run efficiently. Ten years ago, blasting and drilling at DBS depended largely on marking out holes with a tape measure and a can of spray paint, with rigs following manually set-out plans, much like most quarry and civil contractors in Australia still do today.
That reliance has been replaced by a connecting survey, blast design and GNSS-guided drilling, improving every aspect of the process from labor efficiency to blast quality.
Solution
From drone to drill
DBS first began using GNSS-guided drilling in 2016. Now, every new machine is ready for Trimble technology, supported by SITECH Construction Systems in Brisbane. The result is a fully integrated technology stack.
Where the technology really pays off, according to Dan Donnelly, production manager, is in how tightly the pieces fit together. Once an area is cleared and ready for drilling, DBS flies a drone over the site and processes the data in Trimble® Business Center (TBC) office software to extract surfaces, trenches and other site features. That model feeds directly into the company's blast design software, and the finished drill plan is sent straight to the rigs. Once designs are ready, the same Trimble ecosystem carries the data out to the field.
On the drill rig itself, Trimble GNSS positioning is built into the OEM drilling system, allowing operators to move to a marked hole location and let the machine automatically set the correct position and inclination. Donnelly said, "We go from Trimble rover to TBC to the drill rig using the same files end to end. No conversions, no workarounds. It's ready when we are, and it just works.”
Results
Real-world value
The impact on preparation time has been substantial. Blast preparation that once took roughly a full day using manual mark-out has been cut to two to three hours from arrival on site to the start of drilling, and manual staking and tape-measure mark-out, previously a three- to six-hour job on a large blast, has been eliminated entirely.
“Traditionally, you’d need one person for every two drills just to mark out holes,” Donnelly said. “Now we’ve got two guys running 20 drills.”
Accuracy has improved along with efficiency. Redrilling due to poor manual set-out or hole deviation, once considered a normal cost of doing business, is now rare enough that the current workflow can run for months without a single redrilled face hole, according to the company. Better hole placement also translates directly into better fragmentation (the size of the rock coming out of a blast), which keeps more usable material moving through the crusher instead of being set aside as oversized and requiring secondary rock-breaking.
Donnelly added, "With the GNSS and the workflow, we're winning jobs now that we would never have won 10 years ago."
Looking ahead, Donnelly said the company's next major push is autonomous drilling, a capability that doesn't yet exist in Australia's quarry sector, though it is used in mining. DBS is already in discussions about trialing autonomous operation on its next round of new machines.
For a family business that started with a single secondhand rover less than a decade ago, it's the next step in a workflow that already links drone capture, digital design and GNSS-guided drilling into one continuous process. One of few Australian drilling contractors with this level of technology built into their workflow, DBS is continually planning to take its stack as far as it can go.
