Hexagon announced that PT Bumi Suksesindo, the Merdeka Copper Gold subsidiary running the Tujuh Bukit Gold Mine in East Java, cut load-and-haul costs 14% in six months after installing OP Pro fleet management and bringing in Hexagon’s Smart Centre consultants. Truck productivity up 11%, excavator productivity up 17%, queue time down 17%, excavator hang time down 53%. Fuel ratio improved 9.5%, knocking roughly 3,405 tonnes of CO2 off the annual tally. High-precision GPS guidance with loading accuracy under 20 centimetres reduced ore loss and dilution enough to recover more than 600 ounces of gold that would otherwise have stayed in the ground.
Here’s what this really means. Those numbers are good — genuinely good — but they’re the kind of numbers you get when an operation was leaving money on the table to begin with. A 53% reduction in excavator hang time isn’t a miracle; it’s an indictment of how the fleet was being run before. When trucks sit idle at the shovel or queue at the crusher, that’s diesel burning and ounces costing more to pull. Fleet management software doesn’t create value out of thin air. It exposes the waste that shift-to-shift inconsistency was hiding. This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this circus — vendor installs a system, productivity jumps 10-15% in year one, and everyone celebrates. The real question is whether those gains hold in year three, after the consultants go home and the mine hits harder ore zones.
The compliance figures are the part worth paying attention to. BSI logged more than 99% login compliance, over 95% assignment compliance, and 90.8% Optimiser usage within six months. That’s the actual story. I’ve watched mining companies spend millions on dispatch systems that operators quietly ignored within a quarter — trucks running manual, supervisors overriding the optimiser because it didn’t match what the shift boss wanted, and the dashboard quietly turned into expensive wallpaper. Software is only as good as the discipline behind it. BSI got its people to actually use the tool, which is harder than installing it and says more about site leadership than about Hexagon.
Erik Wibisana Barnas, Technical Services Senior Manager at BSI, said the biggest pre-implementation challenge was consistent fleet productivity across shifts. Anyone who’s spent time around mines knows exactly what he’s talking about. Day shift runs tight, night shift drifts, and the aggregate numbers blend the difference into mediocrity. Real-time visibility — seeing queueing and hang time develop mid-shift rather than reading about it in tomorrow’s report — is what closes that gap. The money was never in the technology. It was in shortening the feedback loop between a bad decision and its correction.
Hexagon’s Optimiser dynamically assigns trucks based on current loading equipment requirements, which reduces the unproductive time that accumulates when dispatch is running on stale assumptions or gut feel. Fine. This is incremental optimization, and it works, but let’s keep perspective: these are percentage-point improvements on an already-functioning operation, not a step change in the business. If you’re modeling Merdeka’s future cash flows, don’t compound a 14% cost reduction in perpetuity. Ore grades move, haul profiles lengthen, equipment ages. The efficiency gains from a system like this plateau once the obvious waste is wrung out.
The 600 ounces of recovered gold from better loading accuracy deserves a note, though. Dilution and ore loss are the silent killers of open-pit economics. Every truck that loads waste alongside ore hauls, processes, and reagents material that produces nothing, and every ounce of high-grade left behind in a sloppy dig is revenue nobody invoices. Sub-20-centimetre guidance directly attacks that. Over a mine’s life, that discipline compounds into real money — far more than a single year’s 600 ounces suggests. It’s the least glamorous line item in the release and probably the most valuable.
The sustainability angle — the CO2 reduction — I’ll take at face value but file it where it belongs. A 9.5% fuel ratio improvement is a cost saving that happens to reduce emissions. When the press release leads with carbon numbers, that’s marketing dressing up the P&L. Nothing wrong with that; burning less diesel is good for the margin and the atmosphere. Just don’t confuse it with a decarbonization strategy. Fleet optimization is efficiency, not transition.
Dave Goddard, President of Hexagon’s Mining division, made the point that fleet productivity is built on thousands of decisions every shift, and that visibility and consistency are what improve them. He’s right, and to his credit he didn’t oversell it. The emphasis Hexagon and BSI both placed on knowledge transfer — embedding practices within the organization rather than parachuting in experts — is the difference between a sustainable capability and a vendor dependency. Barnas said the focus was on transferring knowledge, not just implementing the system. Smart framing, and the right one. In mining tech, the graveyard is full of deployments where the vendor’s consultants became a permanent line item and nothing stuck.
The commercial tail is where investors should look closely. The relationship is expanding to Merdeka’s Pani Operations under a five-year agreement — initial deployment of six high-precision and 40 low-precision systems, with another 47 low-precision truck units in process. Hexagon converted a successful pilot into a multi-site, multi-year contract. That’s how enterprise software actually wins: prove it at one operation, then roll it out at the customer’s next one with the sales cycle already shortened. For Merdeka, the Pani deployment is a chance to export Tujuh Bukit’s institutional learning rather than relearn it. For Hexagon, it’s reference-ability — the most valuable asset in mining tech sales, where every buyer wants to know who’s running it successfully before they’ll sign.
My take on the fishy parts: six months is a short measurement window, and vendors love it because it’s long enough to show gains and short enough to precede any regression. Ask for the eighteen-month curve. Also, results announced jointly by the technology provider and the customer are, by definition, cooperative marketing — the incentive to cherry-pick favorable metrics is structural, not hypothetical. The numbers here are plausible and internally consistent, which is more than can be said for a lot of vendor case studies, but a professional skepticism discount still applies.
The broader lesson for anyone watching from the sidelines: operational technology in mining is one of the few places where software spends are genuinely measurable against tonnes moved and ounces recovered. When a fleet system demonstrably cuts unit costs 14%, that flows straight to all-in sustaining cost and, at the margin, to whether marginal ounces are economic in a soft gold tape. Watch which mid-tier miners are actually deploying these systems and enforcing compliance, not just buying licenses. The ones that do will quietly widen their cost advantage while their peers issue press releases about AI ambitions. Tujuh Bukit is a modest story about trucks and shovels — and that’s precisely why it matters.
