Michael McGough is Account Director at Totalmobile Australia, looking after heavy asset industries including mining/mineral/metals, oil and gas, construction, manufacturing, and transport and logistics. These are industries that run on equipment, output, and uptime, meaning where an asset breaking down or a job getting missed doesn’t just create inefficiency; it stops revenue.
Michael spends his days talking to the organisations carrying that pressure, and his view on where they’re falling short is direct and specific.
In this latest blog, Michael explores digital fatigue, the last mile of field execution, and why the answer to rising costs isn’t always hiring more people.
Where digital transformation is falling short
These are mature industries, but digitally fragmented ones. There’s a heavy reliance on large enterprise platforms for the core business like finance, procurement and asset records, and that backbone is reasonably well established. But the last mile of field execution is still heavily paper-based in a lot of these organisations.
Work gets planned in the system and then falls off a digital cliff the moment it reaches the field. That disconnect creates inefficiency that’s hard to see from the top but very visible on the ground.
Digital transformation is high on the priority list for most of these organisations, but executing it is where most of them get stuck.
Why field execution keeps getting deprioritised
These organisations are juggling a lot of competing pressures: ESG commitments, health and safety, compliance and operational efficiency. When it comes to prioritising, it’s often the digitisation of field work that gets moved to the bottom of the list.
Part of it is also timing. A lot of these businesses have just completed a major enterprise system implementation, which takes years and significant energy. Once that’s done, the appetite for another large-scale change is low.
The operational layer of how work gets scheduled, executed and reported in the field often gets treated as a separate problem to solve later. The issue is that “later” keeps moving backwards.
Controlling what you can when costs are rising
When costs spike on fuel, labour or equipment, the instinct is often to pause investment in anything that’s non-essential. And digitising field operations can look like a nice-to-have rather than a core business need at that time.
Obviously, you can’t control the fuel crisis or global supply chain disruption, but what you can control is how efficiently your team operates.
Let’s say a mine shuts down because of an avoidable maintenance failure, or a job gets missed because a work order was lost in a paper pile. That has a direct cost. Getting your field operations running efficiently is one of the few levers you can actually pull when everything else is moving against you.
Why there’s never a perfect time to transform
There’s never going to be a perfect window. There’s always going to be another disruption, another competing priority or another reason to wait. But the work still needs to happen. Ore still needs to come out of the ground, buildings still need to go up, and assets still need to be maintained. The question is whether you’re doing that work as efficiently as you possibly can.
The organisations that get ahead are the ones that look at their rising cost base and ask, “What can we actually control here?”
Making your people more efficient, giving them better tools and reducing the admin burden, that’s how you close the gap when you can’t hire new people.
Where the biggest readiness gaps remain
There are two things. First, there’s the legacy system problem: organisations that have been running the same processes for years and have built their entire operation around them. Changing that feels enormous, especially when sites are remote and can’t afford any downtime.
The second is what I’d call change readiness. The workforce in these industries skews toward people who’ve done things a certain way for a long time, and it’s worked for them. The idea of doing everything on a mobile device is a genuine cultural shift, not just a technology one. They understand the efficiency gains on paper, but the confidence that it’s going to work and that it’ll be supported end-to-end, that’s what’s missing. And that’s where the consultative piece matters. You have to go to site, understand how each function actually works, and address the concerns directly rather than just pitching a product.
Doing more with less without putting more pressure on people
Quality suffers, and the consequences in heavy asset industries can be serious. If a worker is stretched across more jobs than they can manage, things get missed. Admin gets left to the end of the day and then forgotten, or a piece of equipment that should have been flagged as unfit for use doesn’t get reported.
In industries where health and safety exposure is real, that’s not just an efficiency problem. It can have dire consequences.
The better question isn’t “How do we get more out of our people?” but “How do we make our people more effective?”
No double handling of data, no waiting for connectivity to push through updates, no paperwork that eats into productive time. Being more proactive rather than reactive. That’s the shift that can make a difference.
What a high-performing heavy asset organisation looks like
It’s one that can take everything it has, from work orders to workforce and from assets to schedules, and dynamically allocate all of it in real time in a live system that can course-correct with a few clicks when something changes. Not in a spreadsheet or in a planning meeting.
Things will always continue to change beyond your control. A job might run longer, a worker calls in sick, or a piece of equipment goes down when you least expect it.
Right now, a lot of organisations respond to that by putting three or four people in a spreadsheet for half a day trying to figure out what to do next. A high-performing organisation handles that in minutes, and the field team doesn’t miss a beat.
On top of that, the right information needs to surface to the right people automatically on what’s been done, what hasn’t and what’s overdue, so that the workers in the field spend their time doing their job and not filling out forms or doing more admin.
That’s the version that’s possible for these industries.
