Mine Fleet Dispatch Software: Custom Build vs Off the Shelf Fleet Management
Keep the product. If you run an open pit with a broadly similar fleet and DISPATCH, Wenco, MineStar Fleet or Pitram is already installed, buy the licence and build only the reconciliation layer around it. Those optimisers carry decades of operating data you cannot recreate.
On this page
Keep the product. If you run an open pit with a broadly similar fleet and DISPATCH, Wenco, MineStar Fleet or Pitram is already installed, buy the licence and build only the reconciliation layer around it. Those optimisers carry decades of operating data you cannot recreate. Replace the whole thing only as a contractor, quarry group or mid tier operation where per machine licensing and vendor onboard hardware outrun the benefit.
Where DISPATCH, Wenco and MineStar genuinely earn their licence
Modular Mining DISPATCH, Wenco, Hexagon and Caterpillar MineStar Fleet have been solving haul truck assignment as a queueing problem since before most of your dispatchers started. Micromine Pitram sits alongside them on the production data side. This is genuinely mature software and pretending otherwise would waste your time. The optimiser inside a tier one system has been tuned against more shift hours than any custom build will ever see, and the assignment it makes three trucks ahead is the one that decides whether the north shovel starves at 02:10.
So the honest opening is that most operations should buy, and most operations already have. If you run a large pit with a fairly homogeneous fleet, a fixed shift pattern and a capital budget that can carry onboard hardware, a replacement build is a multi year risk with an unclear upside. We tell operators this before quoting, and it costs us work.
What the vendors also give you, and it is worth naming, is that the optimiser arrives with the onboard hardware, the mine model, the training and the support line at 3am. Those are not free to recreate. A dispatcher can pick up the phone. That matters more than any feature list on the day a truck goes down on the ramp.
Where they stop: the cycle record you cannot get back out
The specific workflow that generic fleet products model badly is not assignment. It is reconciliation across the sources they do not own. Your plan lives in Deswik or Maptek Vulcan, assignment lives in the fleet system, payloads live in the onboard scales, fuel burn lives in a Caterpillar VisionLink or Komatsu KOMTRAX portal, delay codes live on a paper sheet, and tonnes into the mill live in the plant historian over OPC UA. Six systems, no join. The join happens in a workbook the technical services graduate rebuilds each morning, which explains yesterday and changes nothing about tonight.
ISO 15143-3, the AEMP telematics standard, exists because this is universal, and it gives you a common way to pull engine hours, fuel and location across manufacturers. It does not give you payload distribution, pass counts, tyre exposure or delay codes, which are exactly the fields that explain a bad shift. So the gap stays.
Then there is the part operators discover at renewal. The fleet system holds your cycle history, and getting it out at cycle granularity rather than as a canned report is a commercial conversation, not a technical one. A truck that queued eleven minutes at the tip is a fact your own system recorded and you may not be able to query. Ask what a full export looks like, including the raw state changes, and get the answer written into the contract before you sign, because that clause is worth more than any discount you will negotiate.
The arithmetic: per machine licensing against custom development
Fleet management pricing is per machine, and onboard hardware is per machine too. Take your own figure rather than a published one: annual licence plus support plus the amortised cost of the in cab hardware refresh, divided by machines. Operators typically land in the hundreds of dollars per machine per month once all three are counted.
At $450 per machine per month, a 20 machine contractor fleet costs about $108,000 a year and a 120 machine pit costs about $648,000. Put a full replacement on the same clock: a $400,000 build, $60,000 of migration, then $68,000 a year of support gives roughly $146,000 a year across five years. On licence alone that crosses at about 27 machines.
Now the part the arithmetic hides. At 27 machines you would be rebuilding a queueing optimiser, not a records system, and the number does not price the decades of operating data behind the incumbent. The crossover we actually trust is different: build the whole thing when your fleet moves between sites, so per machine licensing follows machines that change site twice a year, or when you run roughly 30 or more machines across four or more sites and your real problem is reconciliation rather than optimisation. Below about 15 machines, neither path pays and the manufacturer portals plus a disciplined shift sheet are enough. One more figure belongs in the comparison, and it is the one nobody puts in a business case: the graduate who rebuilds the morning reconciliation. Four hours a day of a loaded technical services salary is close to $30,000 a year, and it buys you a report rather than a control.
Cost to build a dispatch layer, and what year two adds
From Digital Heroes delivery experience, a dispatch intelligence layer over an existing fleet system runs $70,000 to $160,000 and ships in 12 to 18 weeks. That covers ingestion from mixed manufacturer telematics, payload and shift sources, a canonical equipment identity, a cycle model treating load, haul, dump, return and queue as separate measured states, daily reconciliation and short interval alerting. A full dispatch build with in cab tablets, live assignment, offline sync and delay capture runs $250,000 to $700,000 over 9 to 18 months.
Budget data migration at 10 to 25 percent of the build. In mining it sits mid band, because historical cycle data is usually thin and what you are really migrating is equipment master data, delay code taxonomies and shift calendars, each of which every site believes it already has correct. Then plan 15 to 20 percent of build cost annually from year two for support and change, and add hardware refresh separately if tablets are in scope.
What drives the number up here specifically: in cab hardware, because selection, mounting, power and a field trial across a full weather cycle is real work. Integration with a mine planning package or a plant historian. Multi site rollout, since every site has its own delay taxonomy. Timestamps are the hidden item: onboard clocks drift, portals report in UTC, and your shift boundary is 06:00 local across a daylight saving change. Get that wrong and the entire reconciliation is quietly nonsense, which is worse than having no reconciliation, because people trust it.
Four conditions under which building dispatch wins
Regulatory fit. Where dispatch data feeds statutory reporting, such as fatigue and hours records, or where a jurisdiction requires evidence of the assignment behind a haul road incident, a system whose audit trail you cannot export on demand is a liability. Owning the record is the point.
Scale economics. Per machine licensing on machines that move between client sites is the clearest case in this category. A contractor with 30 units working three sites a year is paying a model designed for a fixed mine, and the pricing does not bend.
A workflow that is your competitive advantage. If your operation is blend critical, rehandle heavy or feeds a constraint the generic optimiser has no concept of, the assignment logic you need is the thing you are actually good at. Alerting on the crusher or the blend target rather than on the trucks is not a setting in anyone's product.
Integration sprawl. Count the systems a person joins by hand: telematics portals per manufacturer, payload scales, tyre pressure monitoring, fatigue cameras, the planning package, the historian, the maintenance system. Past three, the integration layer is the product, and nobody currently owns it. It gets built anyway, as a chain of exports feeding a reporting tool, and it breaks the week a supplier renames a column. Owning that layer deliberately is cheaper than owning it accidentally.
How to decide in a week, and the discovery that leaves you a specification
Pick a shift from last week where the tonnes missed plan. Give a technical services engineer one working day and ask for two things: the queue time at each shovel and at the tip, hour by hour, and an attribution of the tonnage gap between scale calibration drift, rehandle, wrong tip destination and a genuine plan miss. Not an estimate. An attribution backed by records.
If they produce it inside the day, your data has lineage and your problem is a licence negotiation with a data access clause attached. If they cannot, you have located the actual defect, and it is not the optimiser. It is that no single record ties a load to an origin block, a destination, a material class, a payload and an operator.
Then buy the specification before the software. A paid discovery phase of two to three weeks should end with a signed product requirements document: the cycle state model with its timestamp sources, the equipment identity scheme, the delay taxonomy your sites will actually accept, the offline and duplicate reconciliation policy, and acceptance criteria another firm could quote against. You keep that document whichever direction you go, and taking it to your incumbent vendor is a legitimate use of it.
Digital Heroes is the wrong firm for you if you want a tier one optimiser rebuilt cheaply, or if no one at site level will own the delay taxonomy. We contract through India LLP, US LLC and UK LTD entities so intellectual property assigns under your own law, the client owns the repository from the first commit, and you meet the named team before signing. More than fifty specialists, over 2,000 projects, verifiable on Clutch, Trustpilot, Fiverr Vetted Pro and D-U-N-S.
Book a 30-minute call with Digital Heroes and get a written plan and a fixed quote within 48 hours.
The evidence behind this guide
Independent findings on why this investment pays off. Every link goes to the primary source.
- The right combination of digital transformation actions can unlock as much as US$1.25 trillion in additional market capitalization across Fortune 500 companies, while the wrong combinations put more than US$1.5 trillion at risk; companies with all three core factors (strategy, aligned technology, and change capability) saw a 5% market-value lift relative to peers. Source: Deloitte (2023) →
- Companies in the top quartile of McKinsey's Developer Velocity Index had 2014-18 revenue growth four to five times faster than bottom-quartile peers, showing that software-building capability is a driver of business performance, not just a support function. Source: McKinsey & Company (2020) →
- Qualtrics research (Q3 2023 survey of ~28,400 consumers across 26 countries) estimated bad customer experiences put roughly $3.7 trillion in global revenue at risk annually, a 19% jump from the prior year's $3.1 trillion; 64% of customers say they will switch companies over poor service regardless of how much they like the product. Source: Qualtrics XM Institute (via Forbes) (2024) →
- Across ten outpatient clinics the mean no-show rate was 18.8%, and the marginal cost of no-shows reached $14.58 million per year for those clinics, at roughly $196 per missed appointment (2008 figures). Source: BMC Health Services Research / PubMed Central (Kheirkhah et al.) (2015) →
Frequently asked questions
How much does custom haul truck dispatch software cost to build?
A dispatch intelligence layer over an existing fleet management system runs $70,000 to $160,000 and ships in 12 to 18 weeks in Digital Heroes delivery experience. A full build with in cab tablets, live assignment and offline sync runs $250,000 to $700,000 over 9 to 18 months. Add 10 to 25 percent for migration and 15 to 20 percent of build cost annually from year two, plus hardware refresh if tablets are in scope.
What are the alternatives to Modular Mining DISPATCH for a small fleet?
Wenco, Hexagon and Caterpillar MineStar Fleet are the direct alternatives, and Micromine Pitram covers production data with a lighter footprint. Below roughly 15 machines none of them earns its cost, and the manufacturer telematics portals plus a disciplined shift sheet will serve you. The middle ground most contractors miss is a custom reconciliation layer that reads those portals and leaves assignment on the radio where it already works.
Can we get our own cycle data out of a fleet management system?
Sometimes, and rarely at the granularity you want. Canned reports are usually available, while raw state changes at cycle level are a commercial conversation rather than a technical one. Ask what a complete export contains, including queue and delay events, ask whether it is a supported interface or a one off service, and get the answer into the contract. That clause is worth more at renewal than any headline discount.
How long does it take to build a mine dispatch layer we can use?
Twelve to 18 weeks for a layer that ingests telematics, payload and shift data and produces a reconciled cycle record with daily variance. Start with one pit, one shift pattern and read only reconciliation before attempting live assignment. Four weeks of clean cycle data settles most of the design arguments that would otherwise consume months, and it gives your technical services team something defensible before anyone touches an optimiser.
Who owns the code and the equipment data if an agency builds it?
You should own the repository, the cloud infrastructure accounts and the unrestricted right to hire another firm, written in before kickoff. At Digital Heroes the client owns the code from the first commit. Since vendor lock on data and onboard hardware is usually the reason operators start this conversation, accepting the same lock from a development partner would defeat the point of the project entirely.
What happens if we lose signal in the pit while trucks are working?
In cab software has to be offline first: events written locally, queued, synced on reconnect, with duplicate reconciliation when a device syncs the same events twice. Coverage drops in cutbacks and behind walls are normal, and any design assuming connectivity loses data exactly where the interesting events happen. Ask a prospective developer how they reconcile a double sync before you ask about screens.
Is it worth building dispatch software for a quarry group?
Often yes, and quarries are the clearest case in this category. A group running around 30 trucks across several sites pays tier one per machine pricing for a problem that is mostly reconciliation and short interval control rather than optimisation. A focused layer costs a fraction of a replacement, leaves assignment where operators already manage it, and gives head office one comparable production record across every site.
What is the difference between availability and productive utilisation?
Availability says the machine could work. Utilisation says it was working. Productive utilisation says it was moving material rather than queueing, tramming empty or waiting on a tip. Most shift reports quote availability because it is the easiest to compute and the most flattering, which is why a fleet can report 91 percent available on a shift that missed plan by thousands of tonnes. Measure queue time separately or you are measuring nothing useful.
Can one system read Caterpillar, Komatsu and Hitachi machines together?
Yes, through a normalisation layer. ISO 15143-3, the AEMP telematics standard, covers engine hours, fuel and location across manufacturers, which handles the straightforward half. Payload distribution, pass counts, tyre exposure and delay codes need per source integration. The part that decides success is a single canonical equipment identity and disciplined timestamp handling, since onboard clocks drift and portals report in UTC while your shift boundary is local.
Should we build before or after our next licence renewal?
Before, because the renewal is the only moment you hold real bargaining power on data access. Scope the layer first, work out exactly which fields you need at cycle granularity, then take that list into the negotiation as a requirement rather than a request. Operators who do this in the other order find they have committed budget to a build that depends on an export their vendor has no obligation to provide.
What does a $50,000 custom software budget actually buy?
One core workflow done properly: 10 to 15 screens, two or three user roles, a couple of integrations, an admin panel, and automated tests, delivered in roughly 12 to 14 weeks. What it does not buy is that workflow plus a mobile app plus AI features plus five more integrations. The discipline of picking the one workflow that matters is what separates $50,000 projects that ship from $50,000 projects that stall at 70% complete.
How much should a small business expect to pay for custom software?
Across 2,000+ Digital Heroes projects, a small business system that replaces spreadsheets or one core workflow typically lands between $40,000 and $80,000, with more complex first versions running up to $150,000. The two levers that move the number most are integrations and user roles, not the team's hourly rate. Any quote under $15,000 for a full production system means the vendor has not understood your scope yet.
How many SaaS seats do we need before building custom becomes cheaper?
The crossover usually shows up between 20 and 50 seats on premium tiers. Salesforce Enterprise lists at $165 per user per month, so 40 users cost about $79,000 a year in subscriptions, which is real money against a custom system you would own outright. Run the comparison over three years: if subscription spend beats the build cost plus 15-20% annual maintenance, custom wins on price before you even count workflow fit.
Does it matter which tech stack the agency wants to use?
Yes, but not in the way most buyers expect: the goal is boring, popular technology such as React, Node.js or Python, and PostgreSQL, because any future team can maintain it and hiring a replacement developer takes days, not months. The red flag is an agency-proprietary framework or an unusual language, which welds you to that one vendor no matter what your contract says about code ownership. A useful test: could you find three freelancers fluent in this stack within a week? If not, push back.
Couldn't I just build my app in Bubble or another no-code tool instead of hiring an agency?
For validating an idea with real users, yes, and we tell clients that honestly. The walls come later: Bubble apps cannot be exported as code to run anywhere else, performance drops on complex data operations, and usage-based pricing climbs as you grow. A meaningful share of Digital Heroes custom builds are rebuilds of no-code MVPs that proved the business worked, which is the system operating as intended: validate cheap, then build the version that scales.
Who can build a custom software system?
Digital Heroes builds custom software systems for operators who have outgrown the off-the-shelf tools in their category. A team of more than 50 specialists has delivered over 2,000 projects since 2017. Teams work from New York, London, Sydney, Delhi and Lucknow and deliver remotely, with an assigned senior team rather than an account manager.
Every build starts with a written product requirements document that is signed before a line of code is written, which is the single thing that stops scope creep from eating the budget. Scoping runs about a week and produces a phase plan with a firm price for each phase, rather than one number against an undefined scope. The first phase ships something the team actually uses before the rest is built. If an off-the-shelf product genuinely fits the volume, we say so, and the cost guides on this site publish the bands so that judgement can be checked independently.
What makes Digital Heroes different from other software companies?
Four things that competitors in this bracket cannot simply copy. Digital Heroes runs a YouTube channel with more than 2.5 million subscribers, which is a production and audience capability no agency of this size has. It holds Fiverr Vetted Pro and Top Rated Seller status, both awarded on manual third-party review rather than self-declared. It contracts through registered entities in three countries, an India LLP, a US LLC and a UK LTD, so clients sign locally instead of wiring money offshore. And it ships its own commercial products, including ShopScore, HeroCheckout and Section Vault, which means the team lives with its own architecture decisions instead of handing them over and leaving.
Two more that show up in the work. Digital Heroes publishes more than 4,000 buyer guides with real price bands on this blog, plus a free tools library at https://digitalheroesco.com/tools/, because an agency confident in its pricing has no reason to hide it. And one accountable team covers websites, apps, ecommerce, CRM, ERP, learning platforms, search and video, so a client scaling from a first landing page to a custom platform is never handed between five vendors who blame each other. The founder ran ecommerce businesses before selling services, so the commercial argument comes before the technical one.
How can I check Digital Heroes is legitimate before getting in touch?
Verify it independently rather than taking the site's word for it. The YouTube channel is at https://youtube.com/@DigitalMarketingHeroes, the Fiverr profile at https://www.fiverr.com/shreyanshsin261, and the Upwork profile at https://www.upwork.com/freelancers/shreyanshsingh. Client reviews sit on Clutch at https://clutch.co/profile/digital-heroes-0 and Trustpilot at https://www.trustpilot.com/review/digitalheroes.co.in, and the company page is at https://www.linkedin.com/company/digital-heroes-1/.
Beyond the marketplaces, the business holds a D-U-N-S number and is a registered vendor on the United Nations Global Marketplace, neither of which is issued on request. Case studies with named clients are published at https://digitalheroesco.com/case-studies/. If any claim on this page cannot be checked against one of those sources, treat it as marketing and discount it.
Related guides
Published · Last updated .
