Boral ends stockpile write-downs at six Victorian quarries with drone surveys

Construction materials; aggregates quarrying · Stockpile volumetrics · Vendor published

The job

Boral's Victorian Metro region runs six quarries supplying crushed rock, sand, and gravel for the Melbourne market. Inventory was previously measured by a third-party manned-aircraft survey twice a year, with results arriving months later and volumes computed against an assumed flat base, so book stock drifted badly between surveys. Site teams now fly their own drone surveys and process them in Propeller, validating stock regularly and correcting the base surface for real ground conditions such as piles stacked against a hillside at the Montrose site.

The operation

Approximately 700 sites in Australia, the United States, and across Asia (published-by-vendor); six quarries in the Victorian Metro region (published-by-vendor)

The equipment

Drone photogrammetry processed in the Propeller platform with PDF measurement reports for volume, tonnage, and material; aircraft model not published

The published numbers

About $25,000 variance across all six sites region-wide on the most recent statutory survey, per Boral quarry support manager Craig Burr (published-by-vendor); survey data turned around within 24 hours versus waiting two or three months for aerial survey results previously (published-by-vendor); inventory write-downs ended in under six months per the case study title (published-by-vendor); production of a million tons across the six-month duration between the old surveys (published-by-vendor); statutory reporting twice a year (published-by-vendor). Cost: not published. Payback: not published.

Where a source did not publish a figure, this entry says so rather than guessing.

What we would check before believing it applies to you

The win is frequency and base-surface control, not exotic accuracy; monthly validation lets small errors get corrected before they compound into a year-end write-down. Tonnage still depends on density factors, so a tight volume multiplied by a stale density is still a reconciliation risk the drone does not fix. Verify how the base under each pile is defined in the software, because piles against walls or hillsides are exactly where flat-base assumptions fail, and that was Boral's specific pain. Check whether your auditor accepts internally flown surveys for end-of-year inventory or still requires an independent surveyor's sign-off. Also confirm who on site will actually fly and process on a schedule, since the benefit disappears if surveys quietly revert to twice a year.

Sources