The need to better understand and develop strategies to improve instantaneous shovel productivity at the Cadia Hill Open Pit Mine (CHM) instigated the development of the Shot to Shovel' project. This project has involved the implementation of a drill and blast (D&B) information management system to capture current and future experience. Equally important has been the manual monitoring of shovel productivity and direct use and analysis of high precision GPS and productivity data logged by Modular's Dispatch System. The analysis of this type of data was facilitated with the application of GIS based software (ie MapInfo). This has shown to be a powerful medium to display, interpret and assess this type of spatial information on a blast-by-blast basis._x000D_
Cadia Hill's well-defined D&B processes supplemented with the application of the above systems are providing a unique capability to assess and better understand the impact of both muckpile conditions and operator proficiency on instantaneous loading productivity. This is facilitating the definition of appropriate optimisation strategies in both drilling and blasting and operator proficiency training. This paper gives a summary of the work conducted in the Shot to Shovel' project, describes the engineering tools being implemented and discusses preliminary findings and their practical implications.