How Grader Performance Monitoring Improves Haul Road Maintenance
Knowing which road needs maintenance is only half the job. Mine teams also need to know whether the grader reached that road, how much useful work occurred, and whether maintenance effort was focused on the priority areas.
Grader Performance Monitoring is the execution record in that process. It does not identify which roads are deteriorating—that is Road Condition Monitoring or an inspection. GPM shows what the grader actually did once the work was allocated.
Maintenance priority is identified
The cycle starts with a priority, not with a machine hour. Priorities usually come from RCM heat maps and Road Score, from inspections, or from production and safety calls the site already makes.
If that list is weak, grader telemetry will still show movement. It will not fix a maintenance process that is still chasing the last radio call. How condition data becomes a queue is covered in How to use road condition data to prioritise haul road maintenance.
The grader is allocated
Superintendents then task the fleet: which grader, which road, and how much of the shift should be spent there. That is still an operational decision. Telemetry does not dispatch the machine.
What changes is the quality of the briefing. Instead of “grade the usual roads,” the instruction can name the sections that are actually in the queue.
Execution is measured
During the shift, GPM records where the grader travelled, where grading occurred, productive time and coverage. Supervisors can see whether effort was concentrated on the tasked roads or scattered across the lease.
Engine hours are not that record. A running grader may be travelling, repositioning or idling. The detailed argument for blade-down measurement, Productivity and the Productivity Trap sits in Why engine hours are not enough to measure grader productivity. The question here is whether the allocated work happened where it was meant to.
Supervisors review whether work matched priorities
This is the core use. After the shift, the comparison is simple: here is the priority list, here is where each grader worked, here is how much of the operating time was productive.
A grader can look busy and still miss the road that was supposed to be first. Another can put a high share of the shift into grading and still spend it on a road that did not need maintenance. Both problems show up when execution is laid next to the queue.
Road condition is checked again
If RCM is in use, the last step is whether the running surface improved on the sections that were graded. GPM answers “did we work it?” RCM afterwards answers “did it get better?”
Those are different questions. Productive grading on the wrong road will not lift condition on the right one. Grading the right road and seeing no improvement is a prompt to inspect drainage, material or construction rather than send the grader around again.
What should a superintendent be able to answer after a shift?
- Where did each grader work?
- Which priority roads were reached?
- How much operating time was productive?
- Was effort concentrated or scattered?
- Did grading occur on roads that actually needed maintenance?
- Did condition improve afterwards?
If several of those still start an argument, the site has a visibility gap in execution, in condition, or in both.
Hunter Valley Coal Mine
At Hunter Valley Coal Mine, Proof Engineers deployed GPM so supervisors could see where graders were working rather than inferring output from engine hours. The published case study reports a +122.7% productivity increase, and a separate reported result of baseline grading productivity / effective utilisation moving from 28% to 45%. Operations also shifted from scattered movement toward more focused work on sections that needed maintenance.
Those are results from that site, reported as separate case-study outcomes. They are not a forecast for the next fleet.
See where your graders are actually working
Proof Engineers can review how grader telemetry would sit in your current maintenance process: allocation, shift review, and whether work is landing on the roads that were meant to be first.
Discuss Your Site