How to benchmark haul fleet activity across sites without a site visit

If you run more than one pit, or you're trying to size up a competitor's operation from the outside, you already know the usual way to benchmark fleet activity doesn't scale. You fly someone out, they walk the haul road, count trucks for a shift, maybe pull a telematics export if the site will share it. That works for one pit on one day. It falls apart the moment you need the same number for four pits, or for a site you have no access to at all.

The question isn't really "how do I count trucks." It's how to get a comparable number, on a comparable cadence, across sites that don't report to you and won't hand over their fleet management data.

Why the usual benchmarks don't travel

Telematics gives you precise cycle times and payload data, but only for the fleet wired into that system, and only if someone lets you see it. Fuel burn and production tonnage are lagging indicators, reported monthly or quarterly, and they get blended across pits, shifts, and ore types until the number tells you very little about any one haul network on any one day. A site visit gives you ground truth, but it's a single snapshot, and the travel cost means you do it rarely.

None of that is wrong for its purpose. It's just the wrong tool for the specific job of comparing activity levels across sites on a running basis, especially when one or more of those sites is outside your fence.

What imagery gives you instead

A satellite or aerial pass over a haul network gives you two things reliably: how many trucks are on the network at the moment of capture, and what shape the road is in. Both are visible from outside the fence, and neither requires anyone at the site to cooperate.

Truck count on its own, pulled daily, becomes a usable proxy for fleet deployment once you have enough days to see the pattern: which pits run heavier on which days, where a fleet thins out for maintenance or a weather event, how one pit's count trends against another's over a month. For benchmarking purposes that's the number you need most, because cycle time without knowing how many trucks were running tells you less than you'd think.

Road condition is the other half. A haul road that's rutted, washed out, or overdue for a grade slows every truck on it regardless of fleet size, so a count alone can overstate how much work is getting done. Reading surface condition alongside the count is what turns "trucks on the network" into something closer to a utilization read: active fleet, on a road that's actually letting it move.

Building the comparison

The method that holds up across sites is simple to describe, even if the underlying detail work is not: pull imagery at a consistent cadence, over the same haul network footprint, for every pit you're tracking. Count trucks on each pass. Note the road condition alongside each count. Line the series up across sites and look at relative movement rather than absolute numbers, since different pits have different fleet sizes and different haul geometries to start with.

Daily cadence matters more than high-end resolution here. A single sharp image tells you what one day looked like. A daily series tells you whether a pit's activity is climbing, flat, or falling off, and whether that trend matches what you'd expect given the road condition you're seeing in the same frames. That trend line, held up against a second pit's trend line, is the actual benchmark.

This is the gap Mine Fleet Activity is built to close: a daily truck count and a road-condition read for a defined haul network, pulled from VHR imagery, so you can compare activity between pits without a site visit or a data-sharing agreement. It's running as a pilot on a defined haul network rather than a fleet-wide service today.

If you're trying to get a read on a haul network you can't walk, that's worth a look before your next benchmarking cycle.