Field guide · Core yard management
Core yard management: a practical guide for exploration teams
A core yard is a production line that happens to be outdoors. Core arrives from the rig faster than it leaves for the lab, and everything in between — markup, logging, photography, cutting, sampling, dispatch — competes for the same people, saws and daylight. Good core yard management is mostly about making the state of that production line visible. This guide covers how well-run yards do it, where the traditional tools break down, and how to audit your own.
12.0 m · The flow
What moves through a core yard
Every yard is different, but diamond core broadly moves through the same stages: trays arrive and are racked; markup (metre marks and orientation lines) makes the core measurable; logging captures geology, structure and geotech; photography preserves a visual record before the core is altered; cutting halves it; sampling bags and tags it; and dispatch sends it to the lab.
Two properties of this flow drive almost every management problem. First, the stages are ordered — you cannot photograph core that hasn't been marked up, or sample core that hasn't been cut — so a delay at one bench stalls everything behind it. Second, the stages run at different speeds. A rig can produce 60 metres a day; a geologist logs perhaps 40 on a good one; one saw might get through 35. The yard doesn't fail loudly. It falls behind quietly, one uneven day at a time, until someone asks why assays are six weeks out.
38.0 m · The whiteboard problem
Where the whiteboard breaks down
Most yards run on a whiteboard: holes down the side, stages across the top, ticks and initials in the grid. It's fast, everyone understands it, and for a two-person yard on a slow program it's genuinely fine. It breaks down predictably as programs scale:
- It only exists in one place. The exploration manager in town, the geo at the rig and the client's site visit all see nothing until they physically stand in front of it.
- Erasing is forgetting. When a completed hole is wiped to make room, its history — who did what, when, how long each stage took — is gone. There is no record to defend a QA/QC query or reconstruct a mix-up.
- It shows state, not speed. A tick says a stage finished, not that it took nine days. The whiteboard cannot tell you your cutting backlog is growing 15 metres a day.
- It depends on discipline it can't enforce. Updates happen at smoko, at shift end, or never. The board drifts from reality precisely when the yard is busiest — which is when you need it most.
Spreadsheets solve the erasure problem and create new ones: one person has the file open with a lock, versions fork between laptops, and nobody updates a spreadsheet standing at a saw with wet gloves. The failure mode is the same — the record diverges from the yard.
96.0 m · The habits
Five habits of yards that flow
1. One source of truth, updated at the moment of work
Whatever your system is, there must be exactly one, and it must be updated when the work happens — not reconstructed from memory at 6 pm. Batch updates are where metres get transposed and steps get ticked on the wrong hole. If updating takes more than a few seconds, people will rightly skip it, so the tool has to be wherever the work is: on the phone in the yard, not on a desktop in the office.
2. Make the next action obvious
In a flowing yard, nobody has to ask "what should I work on?" The moment logging finishes on a hole, whoever runs the camera should know it's ready. That handoff is where days quietly disappear — core sits marked-up-but-unlogged because the person who finished markup told nobody, or told one person who went on days off.
3. Watch backlog, not just throughput
"We cut 300 metres today" sounds healthy. "Drilled-but-uncut grew from 1,200 to 1,800 metres this week" is the number that matters. Throughput tells you people worked hard; backlog per stage tells you where the pinch is and whether it's getting worse. Track metres awaiting each stage and review the trend weekly — it's the earliest honest warning you'll get.
4. Know your cycle time
How long does a hole actually take from rig to lab, and which stage eats the time? Most teams guess wrong — the bottleneck is rarely where the complaints are loudest. Even a rough per-stage measurement changes the conversation from "we need to work faster" to "we need a second saw on day shift", which is a request a budget holder can act on.
5. Keep the history
Who logged the interval, when the tray was photographed, what the drilled depth was before it was corrected — six months later, under a QA/QC review or a JORC sign-off, this history is the difference between an answer and a shrug. It should accumulate as a by-product of normal work, because a history anyone has to remember to write is a history with gaps.
160.0 m · Self-audit
Audit your own yard in five questions
- Can someone in the office see the true state of every hole right now, without calling the yard?
- If a hole finished three weeks ago, can you still say who did each stage and when?
- Do you know, in metres, your current backlog at each stage — and whether it grew or shrank last week?
- When a stage finishes on a hole, does the next person find out without anyone having to tell them?
- Could you tell a lab-turnaround complaint from a yard-bottleneck problem with data rather than opinion?
Five yeses and your system — whatever it is — is working; don't change it. Two or three noes is the normal score for a whiteboard yard on a growing program, and it's fixable with process alone if the team is small enough. The habits above don't require software. Software just makes them survivable at scale.
EOH · Where CoreTrack fits
This is the problem we built CoreTrack for
CoreTrack is the five habits as a product: one live board for the whole team, updates in two taps from the yard, automatic step handoffs, backlog and cycle-time analytics, and an audit trail that writes itself. Every plan starts with a free 30-day trial.