Drones, 1.7 km underground.

Gwalia has cut waste before. Back in 1898 a 23-year-old American mining engineer named Herbert Hoover ran the mine, hired to make it leaner, three decades before he became the 31st US President. A century on the job was the same, only the tools had changed.

Above ground, GetNifty co-founder Hayden worked with CASA, the Civil Aviation Safety Authority, to fly in the open airspace near the mine's airport. Cleared for that airspace, the drones took on environmental mapping, stockpile management, and emergency response, jobs that used to tie up crews, vehicles, and hours.

Below ground, the same drones flew cavity monitoring surveys, mapping the voids left after a blast. That work used to mean sending a person and a vehicle into ground that could still be moving. Now a drone went in instead, and came back with a cleaner map.

Getting underground was its own problem. Off-the-shelf drones read their height from air pressure, and they ship with hard limits and behaviours tuned for the open air. Take them a kilometre and a half down and those defaults fight you. He partnered directly with DJI to adapt the barometric sensor system, stripping out the built-in limitations so industrial drones could fly and hold position 1.7 km below the surface.

Flying was only half of it. The bigger build was the system around the drones: an automated drone management system running on QR codes, digital notifications, and digital permissions. Scan a code to get cleared, log the job, and the right people are notified, all without a sheet of paper. It was built paperless from inception, not a paper process later moved onto a screen, which made it the first of its kind on a mine that size.

From there it spread. He turned the mine's paper-driven workflows, the manual inspections, the hand-written logs, the forms re-keyed three times, into automated digital ones. Adoption was easy because it never asked operators to learn a new world. It took steps away instead of adding them, and it lived in the tools and the places they already knew. Less to do, fewer ways to get it wrong, and safety climbed because the digital path was also the easy path.

Add that up across a whole operation and the paper problem is not just stationery. It is shift hours lost, decisions made late, blasts held up waiting on a sign-off, rework when a figure gets copied wrong, and the standing risk of putting a person somewhere they never needed to be. Quietly, it runs into millions of dollars a year. Automate the capture, feed clean data straight into the systems that use it, and that is where the money comes back.

That is the instinct behind GetNifty too. Most small businesses carry their own version of the paper problem: the same details typed in twice, the follow-up that lives in someone's head, the report rebuilt by hand every week. Take capable technology, do the unglamorous work of making it fit the job, and point it at the slow, manual, easy-to-get-wrong parts. The scale changes, the maths does not.