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Managing Contracted Exploration

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Exploration companies that contract out their exploration work face significant record-keeping challenges.

The monthly invoices submitted by the contractor and filed by the exploration company are typically very difficult to work with beyond the immediate objective of controlling monthly expenditure.

The technical report produced by the contractor at the end of the contract typically leaves out a lot of valuable technical and financial detail because it takes too long to include it in a useful format.

Consequently most of these records are never transferred from the contractor's archives to the exploration company's archives - constituting a serious loss of operational experience.

Even if the records are transferred from contractor to client, they are typically buried in boxes of paperwork or spread across multiple laptop computers, seldom sufficiently well-organised to be useful to the next group of company staff or contractors tasked with planning the next phase of exploration work.

The solution to this problem is to require the contractor to record all the contract's operational information in the client's CampControl exploration management system, rather than in their own. This leaves the client with control of all the records at the end of the contract, together with very powerful tools for querying these records and generating reports from them.

If your contractor uses CampControl, you have immediate online access to critical project progress metrics, such as daily drilling advances, sample flow to the laboratory, tasks field teams are working on, helicopter time burn-rate, etcetera. This improves focus and productivity in the field, and provides for your rapid reaction to the development of unfavourable circumstances.

CampControl makes this a very easy route to follow for any size of exploration company operating in any part of the world - even if the exploration camps do not have direct Internet connections.

How to use CampControl from bases which do not have Internet connections is described in the FAQ section entitled "Working without Internet Connections".

Simply ensure that your company has a CampControl account configured for the project whose exploration work is going to be contracted-out (CampControl staff can assist with this), enter the following clauses into your contract, and enforce them!

"The Contractor will use the Company's CampControl account to record the following: (a) All work carried out by project staff on behalf of the Company using the CampControl Exploration Worklogs sub-system; (b) All sample submissions to laboratories and results received from laboratories on the CampControl Samples sub-system, which will serve as the company's sample tracking system; (c) All material purchases and rentals and airline and hotel bookings, using the CampControl Orders sub-system; (d) Additions to and removals from the Company's Capital Items Inventory using the CampControl Inventory sub-system; (e) All helicopter flying time, using the CampControl Helicopter Logs sub-system; (f) Daily drilling progress using the CampControl Drilling Logs sub-system; (g) All vehicle mileage using the CampControl Vehicle Logs sub-system; (h) Copies of all documents material to the project using the CampControl Document Management System.

The Contractor will, in all but exceptional circumstances, seek and place on the Company's records at least two quotations for purchase orders summing to more than [$10,000], and choose the less expensive unless alternative approval has been granted by the Company. The Contractor will use the CampControl Purchase Authorisation procedure to obtain the Company's approval of such purchases. With the exclusion of payments made to staff and contractors for labour at the rates stated in this contract, the Consultant will not pay more than [$25,000] to any one supplier during the course of this contract without the prior approval of the Company, which approval will also be sought using the CampControl Purchase Authorisation procedure. "

Exploration Company CampControl Accounts can be configured for multiple projects such that staff or contractors on one project cannot access information from other projects. Different contractors may be assigned to different projects. All these account configurations are available without additions to the standard exploration company monthly subscription fee.

Exploration Contractor CampControl Accounts can service multiple exploration companies, and are required to pay a monthly subscription fee for each client company on their CampControl account. Clients are able to access only information belonging to their company, and contractor staff can be configured to access only the information related to their roles in specified client companies.