Mining workforce management software for FIFO scheduling & compliance

If you supply labour to mine sites, run a contracting business servicing resources projects, or manage a mining operation’s own contractor workforce, scheduling looks nothing like a retail or hospitality roster. This guide covers what makes mining workforce scheduling different, how licences, VOCs and inductions fit together, which obligations are actually law and in which state, how to build a FIFO roster that holds, and what to check for in software that claims to handle it.

Why mining scheduling is a different problem

FIFO and DIDO cycles run on their own clock

A fly-in fly-out or drive-in drive-out roster runs on a fixed swing pattern — 8:6, 14:7 (often written 2:1), 4:1 and even-time swings are all common, among many others — that continues regardless of which individual is filling the seat. The roster is not a single week you repeat. It is a rolling cycle of crews moving on and off through day and night shifts, with rostered days off that have to line up with flights and camp beds. The scheduling challenge is not just who is working today. It is making sure the right number of competent, cleared workers is inbound for every swing changeover, weeks in advance, with enough lead time to book travel and camp accommodation.

Competency is layered

One mining role can need several different kinds of credential at once, and they are not interchangeable:

• High risk work licences — for work such as forklift, crane, rigging, scaffolding and elevating work platforms. They are issued by the state or territory WHS regulator after a national assessment, not by Safe Work Australia, and are generally recognised across Australia.
• Verification of competency (VOC) — an assessment showing a worker can operate specific equipment or carry out their role. Operators often require a current VOC before someone is allowed on site or starts the job. A VOC is not a licence and does not replace one.
• Generic and site inductions — such as Standard 11 for Queensland coal, plus each operator’s own site induction.
• Health and fitness-for-work assessments — including, for Queensland coal, the health assessments required under the Coal Mine Workers’ Health Scheme.

The training and assessment behind all of these is delivered by registered training organisations, assessors and the operators themselves. Software can hold the evidence and watch the dates. It cannot make someone competent.

Site competencies do not transfer

A worker fully inducted at one mine is not automatically cleared for another, even within the same company and certainly not across operators. Site-specific inductions, equipment competencies — heavy vehicle, confined space, working at heights, particular plant tickets — and fitness-for-work medical clearances generally have to be tracked per site, not just per worker.

Currency can lapse mid-swing

A worker can start a two-week swing fully cleared and have a medical, ticket or induction expire while they are on site, hundreds of kilometres from anywhere they could renew it. A system that only checks at the point of rostering will miss that entirely.

Where the legal obligations actually sit

This is the part most software marketing gets wrong, so it is worth being precise. There is no single national mining safety law. Mine safety is regulated state by state, and the rules that apply to you depend on where you work and what you are mining.

Western Australia and New South Wales apply their nationally modelled WHS laws to mines, with mine-specific laws alongside — Western Australia has covered general industry, mines and petroleum under a single WHS Act since 31 March 2022. Queensland keeps its own mining safety and health Acts. So the frameworks rhyme, but they are not identical and they are not interchangeable. Other states and the Northern Territory have their own arrangements again. Do not assume a requirement you meet in one state satisfies another.

Labour hire suppliers share the duty

If you supply workers to a mine, the WHS duty does not sit only with the operator. Under the model WHS laws, the host business and the labour hire business each owe duties to the worker, they must consult, cooperate and coordinate with each other so far as is reasonably practicable, and neither can contract its duties out to the other. Queensland mines operate under their own Acts, so check how contractor obligations are framed there. Either way, “the site handles safety” is not a position a labour supplier can rely on.

Standard 11 is a Queensland standard

Standard 11 is frequently described online as “the Australian mining induction”. It is not. It is Recognised Standard 11, Training in coal mines, issued for Queensland coal mines under the Coal Mining Safety and Health Act 1999. Its stated objectives include inductions at appropriate levels, refresher training, and verification of competencies through assessment and record keeping. Queensland’s recognised standards state ways of achieving an acceptable level of risk: an operator can manage the risk another way, but must be able to show that its method is at least equivalent. Standard 11 is widely recognised by operators in other states, particularly for contractors and FIFO workers crossing borders, and holding it can help with site access elsewhere — but that is recognition by operators, not a legal requirement outside Queensland. Treat it as a site access requirement to be confirmed per operator, not a national ticket.

Fatigue: a duty, not a prescribed roster limit

There is no FIFO-specific national fatigue law setting maximum swing lengths for mining workers. Fatigue sits under the general WHS primary duty of care: risks, including fatigue, must be eliminated or minimised so far as is reasonably practicable, with consultation and work designed accordingly. Safe Work Australia’s model Code of Practice on managing the risk of fatigue at work (September 2025) is the practical guidance most jurisdictions point to, alongside state codes such as SafeWork NSW’s.

Note carefully what this is not. The prescriptive heavy-vehicle fatigue rules administered by the National Heavy Vehicle Regulator — the counted work and rest hours that apply to fatigue-regulated heavy vehicle drivers — do not generalise to FIFO or mining workers as a class, and the Heavy Vehicle National Law does not apply in Western Australia or the Northern Territory at all. Some of your people may be covered by heavy-vehicle fatigue rules because of the vehicle they drive; most site-based mining workers are not. Any software or supplier that tells you it enforces “mining fatigue law” is describing something that does not exist as a single rule set.

A roster that technically fills every shift but works a crew into the ground is still a safety problem. Software can make rostered and worked hours visible and flag obvious warning signs. Designing a safe roster stays with the businesses that owe the duty.

What to look for in mining workforce software

1. Site-specific competency and induction tracking. The system needs to track clearance per site, not just per worker, and show at a glance which sites a given person is currently cleared for.
2. Enforcement, not just a red dashboard. A dashboard showing an expired ticket still relies on someone noticing before they roster that worker. A gate that prevents the placement removes that dependency, which matters most where the consequences of a miss are highest.
3. Competency records, kept separate from training. Licences, VOCs, inductions and medicals held as records with their evidence and expiry dates. The system should hold the outcome of training and assessment, not pretend to be the trainer or the assessor.
4. Swing visibility. A forward view showing who is inbound for the next changeover, who is due for R&R, and where gaps are opening weeks ahead rather than this week — and a straight answer from the vendor on whether it generates rotation cycles or holds the shifts you create.
5. Fitness-for-work and medical currency. Medical clearances often carry defined validity periods and can be site- or role-specific. They need the same expiry tracking and reminders as licences and tickets.
6. Real-time visibility across remote sites. Mine sites are remote and thin on admin support. A live view of coverage, upcoming swing changes and clearance status, reachable from a phone, matters more here than in a metro operation.
7. Clean payroll export with site-based hours. Mining rosters carry different rates for different shift types and site allowances. Hours need to reach payroll without manual re-entry.
8. An audit trail that survives scrutiny. When an operator or a regulator asks what was tracked and when, you want a record, not a reconstruction.

How OnCrew approaches mining workforce management

OnCrew’s core model — a fluctuating workforce assembled and kept compliant across multiple sites, rather than a single fixed team — maps onto how resources labour supply actually runs. Here is precisely what it does and does not do.

• Per-site requirements, set to warn or enforce. Each site carries its own requirements, chosen from OnCrew’s credential catalogue, and each requirement is set to warn or to enforce. Where it enforces, a worker who is missing it or whose document has expired is blocked from that site’s shifts and left off the fill list; placing them anyway takes a deliberate admin override, which is written to the audit trail. Where it warns, the allocation proceeds and the coordinator is told exactly what is missing. A requirement only blocks if you set it to enforce. Because requirements attach to the site, a worker cleared for one operation and not another is handled site by site. More on the compliance engine.
• Licences, VOCs and inductions on one record. Each worker’s high risk work licences, tickets, VOCs, inductions and medicals can be recorded against their profile with a document number, issue date and expiry date. Workers photograph and upload their own documents from their phone during onboarding, and uploads wait for your office to review. OnCrew holds the outcome of training and assessment: it does not deliver training, conduct a VOC, run Standard 11 or decide that anyone is competent, and a stored document is a record, not a sign-off.
• Expiry tracking with reminders. Every recorded expiry date is rechecked automatically, so a document that lapses shows as expired rather than staying current on paper, and where SMS reminders are switched on the worker is texted 14, 7 and 1 day before it lapses.
• Recurring shifts — not a rotation engine. Shifts can repeat daily, on weekdays or on chosen days of the week, for up to six months from the first shift and up to 180 shifts at a time. OnCrew does not generate on/off rotation cycles: there is no setting for an 8:6 or 14:7 swing. The practical approach is to create each block of on-days as a daily repeat with an end date, then fill and track it like any other shift.
• Smart Fill for changeovers. Smart Fill applies the hard gates first — site compliance, onboarding readiness and availability conflicts — then ranks the remaining workers by role match, their history at that site and with that client, distance from the site and how recently they last worked, with a bonus for full compliance. Offers go out in one tap. It does not rank people by a reliability score, and the ranking is not a model that learns; it is the explicit scoring just described.
• Fatigue and same-day indicators. Where a worker already has more than about 50 booked hours in the seven days to the shift, would get less than about 10 hours’ rest before it, or is already booked that day, OnCrew flags it to the coordinator before they allocate. These are operational warnings to inform a human decision — they are not an enforcement of any fatigue law, they do not model fatigue risk, and they do not discharge your WHS duty.
• Onboarding ahead of mobilisation. Workers self-onboard from their phone — details, tickets and licences photographed, your induction, medical information held with application-level encryption, and tax, super and bank details. Your office then reviews the file and marks the worker ready to work before they can be placed, so a new starter can be prepared ahead of a mobilisation date without a paper chase.
• One pool across projects. Every client, site and shift sits in one system drawing on the same worker pool, so a lapsed licence shows up wherever that worker might be rostered, and a worker freed up early on one project can be offered a swing on another. Mine-operator clients, their sites and the supervisors who sign off sit in the client CRM alongside the shifts you fill for them.
• Live operational view. A dispatch map shows every site, crew and shift on one screen, from a desktop or a phone.
• Location-checked clock-in. Clock-ins are GPS-stamped and checked against the site’s geofence, recorded in the site’s local time, with off-site clock-ins flagged for the supervisor rather than silently blocked. Clock-out is time-stamped but not location-checked. Approved hours export payroll-ready to Employment Hero, Xero (via a bridge file) and MYOB AccountRight.
• Audit trail. Shift creation, worker allocations, compliance overrides, changes to workers’ compliance records and to site requirements, and timesheet approvals are logged with who and when.

What OnCrew does not do: it does not deliver training, conduct VOCs or Standard 11 assessments, or issue qualifications; it does not generate FIFO on/off rotation cycles or model travel and camp bookings; it does not run payroll, calculate award or site-allowance rates, pay superannuation or file STP; it does not replace a mine’s safety management system; and it does not make any operator legally compliant. It manages who is cleared, who is rostered and what hours were worked, and it gives you the record.

Requirements that come up repeatedly on Australian mine sites

Exact requirements vary by operator, site, commodity and state. These recur often enough to plan around, but each must be confirmed with the operator rather than assumed:

• Site-specific induction — almost universally required before site access, and generally not transferable between operators.
• A generic industry induction — Standard 11 in Queensland coal, with different arrangements in other states and commodities.
• Licences and plant competencies — high risk work licences, heavy vehicle licences, confined space entry, working at heights and specific machinery tickets, depending on role.
• Verification of competency (VOC) — for the specific plant or task, often required before a worker starts and frequently tied to the operator’s own site procedures and equipment.
• Fitness-for-work medical — commonly required before mobilisation and periodically after, often alongside site drug and alcohol policies. In Queensland coal, employers must ensure a health assessment under the Coal Mine Workers’ Health Scheme on entry to the industry and at least every five years.
• Right to work verification.
• Police check — frequently requested, particularly for camp-based positions.

Because these differ site to site and change periodically, manual tracking across a mobile, multi-site workforce is one of the higher-risk administrative environments a labour supplier can run without dedicated software.

Building a FIFO roster that holds

Whether you do it on a spreadsheet or in software, the same sequence keeps a FIFO roster from falling over.

1. Set the rotation backbone first. The on/off pattern, the day and night rotation and the R&R days are what everything else hangs off, so agree them before naming anyone.
2. Match every swing to cleared workers. For each block, narrow to people who are free for the whole swing and hold current, site-specific clearances — not just the right headcount.
3. Plan changeovers weeks ahead, not days. Travel, camp beds and site access all need lead time, so gaps in an upcoming swing must surface early enough to actually fill them.
4. Fill vacancies before they become no-coverage. A pull-out or an extended swing costs far more to fix late at a remote site than at a local one, so the faster you can see who else is free and cleared, the smaller the problem stays.
5. Record what actually happened, not the plan. Pay and compliance need who actually worked which shift. Drift from the cycle should be visible, not argued about later.

Alongside the sequence:

• Track individual swing history, not just the pattern. Cumulative days on and off tell you something a roster template cannot, and repeatedly compressed R&R is a risk worth seeing.
• Build in buffer for renewals falling due mid-swing, so nobody is caught on site with a lapsed requirement and no way to renew before the next roster.
• Keep a cleared bench per site, rather than one generic pool. Site-specific clearance, not headcount, is usually the real constraint on who can mobilise quickly.

Running several projects at once

Few contractors run a single roster. Several projects usually means several swing patterns, sets of site requirements and clients, with workers moving between them. When each project lives in its own spreadsheet, a lapsed licence or an extended swing on one never shows up on the others. Keeping every project’s shifts and every worker’s clearances in one place is what turns that juggling act into a single view.

What a clearance miss actually costs

It is worth being direct about the commercial exposure, separately from the legal one.

• Immediate stand-down. Most operators remove a worker the moment a clearance gap is identified, regardless of how far into the swing they are — leaving the position uncovered until someone can be mobilised, which on a remote site can take days.
• Loss of site access for the supplier. Operators track supplier compliance performance. Repeated misses are a common reason a contractor comes off an approved supplier list, which can mean the contract rather than the placement.
• Regulatory exposure. State mine safety regulators can investigate failures that contribute to, or could have contributed to, an incident — and the record of what was tracked and when becomes central to that inquiry.
• Reputation. Resources labour supply is a tight sector, and a supplier known for gaps finds the next tender harder regardless of price.

Winning and keeping mining labour supply contracts

Compliance and scheduling capability increasingly show up directly in tender evaluations. Operators assessing a labour supplier typically want to see a documented, auditable process rather than an assurance that tickets get checked; evidence of consistent fill rates at swing changeovers; the ability to produce clearance and attendance records on request rather than in three days; and a demonstrable time-to-mobilise for a new starter.

Businesses running this on spreadsheets and shared drives can still win a first contract. Retaining and expanding mining work over time tends to favour suppliers who can show the process is systemised rather than dependent on one person’s diligence — which is the same argument we make about spreadsheets and group chats generally, with higher stakes attached.

Build in-house or use purpose-built software?

Some larger contractors consider building their own tracking rather than adopting workforce software. Weighed honestly: a single site with a stable crew can be tracked manually without much risk. Multiple sites, rotating swings and a workforce moving between operators is a different order of complexity, and the failure mode is not slowness — it is that someone misses an expiry and nobody notices until it matters. Purpose-built software encodes the gate as a system rule rather than a process someone has to remember under time pressure, and the audit trail comes built in rather than assembled after the fact.

If you also run construction or civil crews alongside resources work, our construction, mining and engineering page covers the shared ticketing and dispatch ground in more detail.

Official sources checked for this guide (October 2026): WorkSafe WA — WHS laws · NSW Resources Regulator — WHS legislation · Queensland Government — recognised standards · Queensland Government — Coal Mine Workers’ Health Scheme · Safe Work Australia — labour hire duties · Safe Work Australia — high risk work licence classes · NSW Resources Regulator — operating mobile plant VOC