Businesses · Mining
For mine operators running haul trucks, excavators, dozers, loaders and support fleets — where every cost in the pit is eventually divided by what crossed the weighbridge.
The drain
Cost per tonne is a fraction, and every mine spends its attention on the numerator. The denominator — what the truck actually carried — is counted once at the weighbridge and never attributed back to the cycle that produced it.
A haul road is not a highway. Gradient, surface and load state swamp any comparison made in litres per kilometre — and litres per tonne, the only figure that matters, is almost never calculated.
Tyres, drivetrain and undercarriage on a haul truck are the second-largest line in the pit. They fail expensively, far from a bay, and rarely without a signal that nobody was listening for.
The lease does not change. But it is divided by the tonnes moved — so every short-loaded truck quietly raises the ownership cost of every tonne that did get carried.
A shift is a fixed block of paid time containing a variable number of cycles. Four minutes lost per round, across a shift, is a cycle you paid for and did not run.
Load a truck 8% under capacity and it still runs a full cycle. Full diesel. Full tyre wear. Full operator hour. The cost of the round does not fall with the load — so the shortfall is absorbed by the tonnes that did get carried.
Fuel, wear and payload shortfall are ₹59 of every ₹100. The first two are measured badly. The third is not measured at all — because nothing in the current chain compares what a truck could carry with what it did.
One cycle
Load, haul, dump, return, weigh. Five moments, four to six minutes each — repeated until the shift ends. The cost per tonne is decided in every one of them and measured in none.
The weighbridge is the commercial record. It is not an operating one — it tells you what arrived, never what it cost to get there.
Four buckets is not a full truck.
Bucket count is a proxy, and a generous one. Onboard payload measurement is the difference between a truck that carried 38 tonnes and a truck that ran a full cycle carrying 34.
The shortfall is not an outlier. It is a pattern — which means it is a habit, and a habit belongs to somebody.
Litres per kilometre lies on a gradient.
Two trucks on the same ramp, same load, same shift. One burns 22% more than the other. On a per-kilometre basis they look identical, because the ramp punishes both. Per tonne, they do not.
Per kilometre these two trucks look identical, because the ramp punishes both. Per tonne moved, they do not — and only one of those comparisons can be acted on.
The queue burns diesel and shift.
A truck waiting at the crusher is an engine running, an operator paid and a cycle not happening. Queue time is the most predictable loss in a pit and the least attributed.
Four minutes of queue on a seventeen-minute cycle. It is not a delay — it is a quarter of the haul fleet, stationary, with the engines running.
Half the cycle. None of the revenue.
The empty run earns nothing and costs everything — diesel, tyre wear, operator hour, drivetrain stress. It is also where the fault codes appear, unloaded and unwatched, hours before the truck stops.
A threshold fires when a number is bad. A baseline fires when a number is different — which was three days earlier, and is the only version of this alert that is still cheap to act on.
The tonnes are counted. Now attribute them.
The weighbridge says the shift moved 4,180 tonnes. It cannot say which bench, which truck, which operator or which cycle produced them — or which of them cost twice what they should have.
Bench 7 is expensive on three shifts and unremarkable on two. That is not a bench problem, and the pattern is the clue — it moves with the roster.
How Taabi is different
Every weighbridge can tell you what arrived. That is an outcome, and an outcome cannot be improved.
Taabi holds each cycle against payload, cycle time, fuel, drivetrain stress and operator pattern before it becomes a cost per tonne you can act on.
Every cycle costs the same whether the tray is full or not. Under-loading does not reduce the cost of the round — it just spreads it across fewer tonnes, which is exactly what a high cost per tonne looks like from the outside.
Rules out a volume problemLonger ramp, or a queue, or an operator taking it easy on the return. The cycle breaks into segments, and only the segment that grew is the one worth arguing about.
Rules out a haul-distance excuseIf under-loading alone explained the cost, fuel per tonne would rise in proportion. It rose three times as fast — which means something is burning diesel that is not moving material.
Rules out payload as sole causeTorque converter stall, over-revving on the climb, riding the retarder. The machine records what it was asked to do, and it was asked to do it badly.
Assigns mechanical causeThe same bench, the same trucks, the same ramp — and a cost per tonne that moves with the roster. A pattern is what turns an engineering problem into a training one.
Establishes root causeThe five signals are not a feature list. They are the difference between reporting that Bench 7 is expensive and knowing what to do about it on Monday.
This is the whole difference. A weighbridge gives you an outcome. Payload plus cycle plus fuel plus drivetrain plus pattern gives you a cause — and only a cause can be fixed.
Use cases
Under-loaded trucks and stretched cycles are the cheapest tonnes you are not moving.
Litres per tonne, not litres per kilometre. Compare trucks on the same ramp before you blame the ramp.
A haul truck down at the face backs up the shovel, the queue and the shift target behind it.
Fatigue and speed on the ramp are visible long before they become a report to the regulator.
Benchmark benches, shifts, operators and trucks against one number: cost per tonne moved.
Solutions available
Payload, cycle time, engine hours and utilisation across haul trucks, shovels, dozers and support equipment.
Litres per tonne and per cycle. Drops, refuels and idle burn at the face, the ramp and the crusher.
Engine stress, drivetrain load and fault codes on equipment that fails expensively and far from a workshop.
Movement across benches, haul roads, ramps and the weighbridge, with geofenced zone activity.
ADAS and operator monitoring on haul roads, with recorded evidence for compliance review.
Cost per tonne, litres per tonne, cycle time and downtime benchmarked by bench, shift and operator.
Business impact
Not a percentage we cannot source. A list of things that are true on the left today, and true on the right after.
Every row on the right resolves to the same denominator — ₹ / tonne
Who it's for
Mine operations
Teams whose shift target is set by cycle time, and whose cycle time is set by things nobody currently measures.
Maintenance and P&M
Engineers managing components that fail expensively, far from a workshop, and rarely without warning.
Contract mining
Contractors whose revenue is the denominator and whose cost is every line above it.
FAQ
It is the measurement of the haul cycle rather than its output. Payload, cycle time, diesel burned, idle at the face and at the crusher, and drivetrain stress are recorded per truck and per round, so cost per tonne can be attributed to the bench, the shift and the operator that produced it — rather than reported as a monthly figure nobody can decompose.
Because a haul road is not a highway. Gradient, surface, load state and cycle length vary so much between benches that fuel efficiency per kilometre compares nothing to nothing. Litres per tonne moved is the only figure that survives the terrain, and the only one that reconciles to how the mine is actually paid.
No, and it should not. The weighbridge remains the commercial record. What onboard measurement adds is attribution — knowing which cycle, which bench, which operator and which truck produced the tonnes the weighbridge counted, so a shortfall becomes a correctable operating fact rather than a monthly variance.
Get started
See the drain, the cycle and the evidence chain run against a live haul fleet — bench by bench, shift by shift.
