C.R. Kennedy’s advanced solutions continue to underpin Iron Mine Contracting’s capability to deliver consistent, high-quality outcomes.
Iron Mine Contracting (IMC) has built a reputation for delivering mine earthworks, tailings management, and production services with the pace and precision modern operators expect.
Formed to provide civil, mining, crushing and screening opportunities to the WA market, IMC has been delivering projects to an impressive list of Tier 1 resource clients — including Rio Tinto, Woodside Petroleum, FMG, Roy Hill, Liontown Resources, Gold Fields Limited amongst others — since 2013.
With extensive experience working for clients in remote areas and a deep body of knowledge gained from its diverse multidisciplinary team, IMC clearly understands the specific challenges that constructing and delivering for its clients presents.
Contributing to this success is the company’s long-standing relationship with C.R. Kennedy (CRK) — Australia’s foremost distributor in the geospatial and imaging industries.
CRK National Manager for Machine Control, Nick Leith, spent some time recently with IMC’s Chief Operating Officer Derek Williamson to discuss how the connection between the two companies has led to mutual benefits.
“In 2019, IMC was actively scaling up its business,” Derek said.
“We had been in operation for about four years at that time, and were starting to get some traction, particularly with repeat clients, which had always been our goal.
“Our relationship with CRK kicked off as we set off to grow the business.
“We were casting around for a slightly different value proposition than the one that we had, and met with CRK State Manager Jeff Hugo and put it to him what we wanted.
“Jeff tailored a response. We had a nice, clear, understanding of what CRK delivered and we went from there.”
CRK’s spatial products are renowned, including various Leica Geosystems products such as the iCON machine control systems, GNSS rovers, total stations, laser products and reality-capture solutions.
What began as a straightforward supply arrangement has matured into a tightly integrated technology partnership: CRK equips IMC’s fleet and field crews, while IMC feeds back real-world requirements from active mine sites so systems are configured, trained and supported to match the pressure and variability of mining.
“We use machine control extensively in the mining and civil space,” Derek said.
“Generally, we run GPS on everything, whether they’re scrapers, dozers, excavators.
“The accuracy that the GPS provides is not just a production assistance, it also provides safety and reliability functionality.”
Derek said there was also a positive effect on the workforce.
“It’s well-documented that a good machine control system can turn an average operator into a more proficient one,” he said.
“There are clear benefits. There’s a supply side shortage of skilled people industry-wide, so we wouldn’t move without GPS these days.
“We train our people towards machine control. You can go to our training rooms on any one of our projects in operation and you will see a dummy system there which forms the basis of our training approach, augmented with video calls and reference guides.
“It’s all geared toward adding value, lifting productivity and quality of our finished product.”
Both Nick and Derek stressed the importance of the strong sales and service that CRK provided IMC.
“We switched to CRK because we had been looking for a slightly changed value proposition with our GPS supplier,” Derek said.
“It was the support that was in focus as we were trying to scale our business to involve more and more machines with machine control into line with our earthworks projects, superintendents, surveyors, etc.
“For this to work, everything led us to believe that service was going to be the biggest arbiter of how we unlocked the value of the product.”
Derek said Jeff and his team were an aligned outfit that worked efficiently.
“You can pick up the phone to Jeff and he says he’ll do something. The alignment through his team is really, really strong and that’s the power of the service delivery model,” he said.
“But there’s another alignment factor that makes CRK unique: there is a strong connection between the CRK technicians out in the field and Jeff in the head office.”
Nick said CRK was a strong family-owned business that always prioritised the level of service and support that it gives to clients across Australia, and not just in the home state of WA.
“We provide services in every other main centre: Brisbane, Sydney, Tasmania, NT, down to Melbourne,” he said.
Derek said he also liked the CRK products because operators could easily and quickly pick up the skills needed to use them.
“As I mentioned before, we use those dummy units to teach our staff. Jeff’s good enough to always supply them to us as the basis for training,” he said
“That’s where it starts, and then there is the on-call support if we need it.
“CRK is really proficient at what it does and they really match our business values, which are mainly that time is of the essence and safety is paramount.
“We see the CRK team come to the site, and contribute really effectively because they understand the time usage constraints that we work to.
“They understand the standards around safety and then bring high product knowledge with them.”
Nick said CRK offered long warranties that guaranteed the client peace of mind.
“In terms of durability, operating with a five-year warranty — which includes software and hardware updates — gives the client assurance that the equipment is going to last and be warrantable for that five-year period,” he said.
“It’s in line with the typical life cycle of the asset that it’s placed on.”
Derek said IMC valued that robust umbrella coverage.
“We use the equipment on hard rock, which can be pretty hard on the hardware, such as connections, cables, and the like, with a lot of feedback through track machines, for example, so the warranty is invaluable,” he said.
Derek had some interesting points of view when asked by Nick on where he saw technology progressing in the next 12 to 18 months.
“From a supervisor’s point of view, it is important to have the ability to visualise the job,” he said.
“We rely heavily on our performance kits as we’re doing our site inspections; we’re doing our compliance to plan.”
IMC’s performance kits are curated packages the contractor deploys to new sites or ramp-ups.
Built with CRK’s guidance, each kit blends machine control panels and sensors pre-mapped to IMC’s common machine models, rover kits with spare power and comms, base-station or network GNSS options suited to the mine’s geography, and a reality-capture pathway for weekly surfaces and progress reporting.
“Our checks and ability to visualise the job has become central to what we do,” Derek said.
“So, in the future, we’d love to see product enhancements that can more actively describe where we are in a spatial sense.
“The more people you can expose to that, the more context they have around the job relative to a survey set-up.
“It’s a far more efficient way of working: we need better visualisation and spatial compliance.”
Nick said spatial awareness was a “big topic” at the moment, with artificial intelligence becoming more prominent in the industry.
“Especially around the safety aspect of it, CRK is keeping tabs with what’s coming out and we’re very excited for the future,” Nick said.
“There’s a product called Xsight 360 soon to be released to market. It’s already been announced, and we’re keen on getting our hands on that in the next couple of months.”
The Xsight360 safety awareness solution, powered by Presien, is manufactured by Leica Geosystems, part of Hexagon.
The system detects nearby people or objects and alerts the vehicle operator using sounds and visual cues, which indicate the location and proximity of the hazard so that the driver can take evasive action.
Video and alert data is also transmitted to the cloud where agentic AI generates reports and recommendations for safety professionals.
Nick said the system’s visual AI models are specifically trained for heavy construction operations and continuously improve performance through industry-leading machine learning.
“The Leica CRS360 AI processor runs Presien’s most advanced model to date — refined over 700,000 hours of real-world operation on construction sites — to deliver low-latency operator alerts with minimal false alarms,” he said.
“Utilising proven AI detection technology, purpose-built for construction environments, Leica Xsight360 mitigates risks in real time by detecting hazards to keep people safe on site. The system supports up to six cameras, providing 360-degree coverage on any construction vehicle to detect people, other vehicles, and construction cones to reduce the likelihood of accidents.
“We want to get innovations such as these to key players in the market, like IMC, to test for spatial awareness and safety reporting.
“It will be a fantastic application for toolbox meetings and just general reporting for overall operations as well.”
The sentiment was echoed heartily by Derek.
“There’s an opportunity to be an early adopter as we as we want to uptake this technology: we’d certainly like to play our part there because of the many real applications and benefits,” he said.