HDD Field Production Tracking Guide

This is a practical SiteIntelOps industry resource for horizontal directional drilling operations — written for foremen, supervisors, project managers, operations managers, and executives who need production records that hold up after the crew leaves the site.

HDD production is created through a sequence of field activities involving people, equipment, verified utilities, drilling conditions, tooling, time, and operational decisions. A useful production record should answer more than "How many feet did we install?" It should help answer:

This guide lays out a practical framework for tracking that information.

1. 01Job / Bore Plan
2. 02Utility Locates
3. 03Pothole Verification
4. 04Bore Setup
5. 05Pilot Bore
6. 06Reaming
7. 07Pullback
8. 08Installed Product
9. 09Documentation
10. 10Billable Production
11. 11Job Cost / Performance

The final footage number sits at the end of an operational chain. When only final footage is captured, management loses much of the information explaining how that production occurred.

Before production is tracked, establish the bore record.

Individual bore identification is what allows production and field information to remain connected to the correct installation. Without a bore ID, a day's footage belongs to "the job" — and the job may have a dozen bores in different ground, at different depths, under different crossings.

Potholing is usually thought of as a safety activity. It is also part of the production record: the verified utility determines how the bore is planned, steered, and paced.

Verified utility information may affect:

Pilot production should preserve enough context to understand why progress changed during the bore. That does not mean every measurement needs to be typed in by hand — where compatible electronic locating data already exists, the goal is to keep it associated with the bore rather than re-enter it.

Pilot footage and completed installation do not capture the resources consumed during reaming.

A second or third pass can materially change labor, equipment time, fluid, duration, and job cost — while the final installed footage stays exactly the same. If passes are not recorded, that cost is invisible.

Pullback is where the prepared bore becomes installed infrastructure. It should remain connected to the pilot and reaming activity that preceded it, so the installed product carries its full history.

All figures are fictional and illustrative. They are not SiteIntelOps customer data.

Installed footage alone would show 420 feet for the day. The record shows much more: B-102 has a full pilot and is into a second reaming pass — real work that is not yet billable — and lost time to a breakdown. B-103 is behind plan because of unplanned potholing, not crew performance. An operations manager can see what is coming tomorrow, where the risk sits, and why the day looked thin.

"Delayed" is not enough information. Use a fixed set of categories:

Consistent categories let operations teams see whether lost production repeatedly comes from field conditions, equipment, planning, resources, utility verification, customer constraints, or execution. Free-text notes are valuable — but they cannot be trended.

Production without resource context creates misleading comparisons. A crew of five with one drill and a crew of seven with an extra vac truck are not doing the same work, even on bores of the same length.

If management sees only "600 feet installed," the bore appears to have matched the plan. Operationally, it did not. Planned-versus-actual tracking should include the resources and conditions required to achieve the production — the broader discipline covered in construction production tracking.

Contract structures vary. Potential billable items may include:

1. Field Work↓→
2. Verified Production↓→
3. Contract Item↓→
4. Billable Quantity↓→
5. Review

Not all completed work is automatically billable. The point is to keep verified field quantities connected to the contract items they may support, so review happens against a record instead of a reconstruction.

Same footage.
Different operational result.

Supervisors need this to coach crews fairly. Operations managers need it to bid the next job realistically. Executives need it because margin is decided in the gap between those two bores — the relationship explored in why field production doesn't always translate into profitability.

Modern HDD locating workflows may produce electronic bore information. Depending on equipment and workflow, that may include depth, pitch, distance, rod-by-rod information, bore path information, and location information. DigiTrak locating systems are commonly associated with HDD workflows.

The operational concept is connecting available bore information with:

DCI and DigiTrak are trademarks of their respective owner. Referencing them describes common field workflows only and does not indicate any partnership, integration, certification, or endorsement involving SiteIntelOps.

A supervisor running four drills does not need four more daily reports. They need exception visibility across crews: which bore is behind, which is waiting on a vac, which crossing is coming up today.

Field-level detail explains a single bore. Portfolio-level visibility explains the business — which crews, drills, and job types are consistently producing, and where intervention pays off. That is the layer described in executive intelligence.

The bore is the operational object that connects everything else. Job, crew, and cost are organized around it; potholes, passes, and delays happen to it. Anchor records to the bore and the rest of the picture assembles itself.

1. DataWhat happened?
2. ContextWhy did it happen?
3. ComparisonHow did actual performance compare with the plan?
4. TrendIs this happening repeatedly?
5. ActionDoes management need to intervene?

That progression is what turns field reporting into operational intelligence. Each step depends on the one before it — which is why the quality of the bore record matters so much.

SiteIntelOps is being developed around connecting field production with broader construction operations. For HDD, the SiteIntelOps approach is designed to treat bore activity, potholes, utility crossings, production, crews, equipment, documentation, billing quantities, job-cost context, and management visibility as related information rather than isolated records. For a shorter overview, see HDD production tracking; for the wider underground context, see utility construction management.