Customer Spotlight- Aggregate Resources Industries
Customer Spotlight- Aggregate Resources Industries
Aggregate Resources Industries, or ARI, Inc, has dedicated itself to providing the best service possible to its customers and employees. To further that goal it has embraced technology and digitalization to improve operational efficiency, safety, and drill & blast outcomes.
Kris Jeremiah, ARI's President sat down with us to share their experience drilling and blasting at a site with particularly challenging geology and how incorporating smart technology and digitalization has made all the difference for them.
As the president of ARI, Kris leads operations, new technology innovations and technical services engineering. His thoughts on drones, drills, data, and the digitalization of drill plans:
"From a blast perspective the 3D drone imagery is much more reliable than the laser face profiling because we're actually getting a three dimensional profile of it versus just where we've run the laser down. Drones give us much better information.
It's very user friendly and the accuracy that we're pulling off of these drones is very repeatable. We can do the same flight and get the same accuracy time and time again, whereas with our rovers, when we're getting ground control, sometimes we would have some inaccuracies in gathering that rover data for ground control.”
"They have allowed us to use a simple system that's very accurate and very reliable. Minimal set up time when we come out to the project. We can collect all the data within 15-20 minutes, get it uploaded, and then it's back to the drills. And within a couple of hours we actually can be drilling holes from the time that we show up to the site."
“The nice part about using Strayos is when we gather the information and we send the drone data to Strayos and the imagery to Strayos, they collect all the data, they process it. And there's very little user interface once we've collected the data. So that's been very helpful for us. And once all the data is processed in Strayos, we build our drill plans and we're able to email that out to the drills, the smart drills, or to the rovers for the not so smart drills that we have.
So it's just Strayos has basically worked with the systems that we work with (Epiroc and Trimble) to have a pretty seamless export process back out to the field.
And then one of the other benefits that we've seen is on areas that we're trying to access that are difficult for people to climb around. So those are some of the operational benefits that we've seen."
In the Field
"We have a project down in Southern Oregon. A quarry, that we've worked in over the last 20 plus years. It's an extrus of igneous basalt. It's fairly blocky, fairly large joints. And so historically, we've had some oversize issues there. I guess this is probably the first time where we put everything together. We put the the drone survey together. We put the utilization of the smart drills together and the Strayos optimization of drill hole placement. And so this was kind of our Aha Moment of where everything came together and we saw improved fragmentation, reduced drill hole reduced holes because we weren't putting holes in places that they weren't needed."
"So overall results on this one, the customer saw improved fragmentation. We didn't have fly rock issues just so for this particular site, it was a good overall results that that we were seeing from the combination of all the data that we're able to bring together and execute in the field."
The Technology ROI
As far as the return on our investment, basically, one of the things that we found is reduced time laying out holes when we're using the smart drills much quicker set up time versus laying out either the ground control points with the rover or with the electronic ones with the arrow points that we've used in the past. And then basically, just the overall drill layout is expedited from just having to lay out with regular tape and paint, which we've done there for the last 20 years.
One of the things that we're seeing is we're actually drilling less holes because every hole is put in an optimum location. And so we're not drilling holes just to pick up a toe and load the bottom 10ft of it. So I think we have actually reduced our drilling costs because we're not drilling unneeded holes and then just the ability to optimize the hole placement to minimize fly rock and maximize fragmentation.
Then the customers happy because they have reduced processing costs."
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