How to start a GroundHog
pilot at your mine

Any new Fleet Management System is a BIG commitment. Here at GroundHog, we understand our customer’s needs to “kick-the-tires” before deciding to go all-in with us. We’ve made it super-simple to on-board a mine on to our system and get you up and runing in 2 days or less. Give us a shot — try us out. It’ll be worth your time.

The Pilot Process

1

1 Hour Discovery Call

During this discovery call, we go through a checklist that includes understanding your mining method, your daily planning process, the benches or stopes/faces you mine, the equipment you use, the methods you use to track production, your equipment availability and utilization, your shift-change process, your pre-start checklists, your workplace process, and your maintenance and safety processes and a host of other things.

We also ask you to share any sort of data you may have (on paper or in excel or .csv files)

This discovery can be done remotely — or we can come for a site-visit. We find that site-visits are a lot more effective to understand the lay-of-the-land.

2

Setup servers and import configs

We take the information you provided and setup your GroundHog cluster — in our securee GroundHog cloud or on your on-prem servers.

We then import all the data you provide us with (or whatever you can provide us with):

Equipment list (make / model / capacities)
Operator lists with their training sign-offs
Location identifiers - Benches, Stopes, Faces, Rooms, Ore-Passes, Stockpiles, etc
Equipment Pre-Start inspection sheets
Workplace Exam sheets (JSAs, Take 5’s, or whatever you use)
PLOD sheets (production logs)
Daily reports, etc.

3

[Optional] Setup FMS Tablets and Telematics

Some of our pilot customers also install the FMS in the equipment cabs. We setup the apps on the tablets (Android or iOS) that are mounted in the cab.

For Android, we recommend the Samsung Active Tab 3 (as of 2021) For iOS, we recommend the low end iPads — the 32GB version

For mounts, we recommend RAM Mounts (please call us for the specific make/models). We’ve also found that Haavis mounts work really well — especially if you want locked mounts.

We also recommend that these tablets be setup in a Kiosk only mode.

4

Training + Dry Runs

Our software is super-simple to use. Most of our pilot customers tinker around and explore the system and start using it for real-time production tracking within a week or so.

That said, we still train all the supervisors and opertors on best-practices to follow when using our software. It helps shorten their learning curves and drives up adoption.

We help our pilot customers go through quite a few dry runs – to transition from the process they currently use to performing the same types of activities in GroundHog.

And then, we train them on other capabilities within the GroundHog Platform so they can unlock more productivity gains within a couple of weeks.

5

Kick-the-Tires

Once we are done training, our pilot customers typically use GroundHog in parallel to their current process — to kick the tires and verify that GroundHog indeed checks-off on all the capabilities that we say we have.

Our pilot customers typically have a checklist to go through in this ‘kick-the-tires’ phase to ensure that the way the system is configured indeed meets the needs the mine has.

6

Check-in and provide feedback

Our pilot customers typically have a checklist to go through in this ‘kick-the-tires’ phase to ensure that the way the system is configured indeed meets the needs the mine has.