During the early stages of my career working as an underground operator and supervisor, I was fortunate to work for a mining contractor whom valued quality shift planning and recognised this as a key capability that underpinned a profitable contracting business.

Working for an organisation that valued (just as much as pure hard work and harder play) knowledge of both good shift planning and data analysis as essential elements of their business, meant that young engineers (even those passing themselves off as underground miners) were required to know and understand this to the same degree as how to charge, bog and drill a development heading. 

Not only did this start to my career provide me with a deep exposure to practical underground mining operational execution, it also influenced my views regarding operational planning. Exposure to traditional mine planning software later on in my career only further defined my view that, execution planning horizons require a different focus and tooling to mine planning. Those tools that have existed have predominantly been built for mining engineers and/or control room operators as the end users, not supervisors. 

Even today, with ever increasing levels of accountability matched with decreasing authority levels, the shift supervisor does not have many (if any) tools specifically built for them to help create, improve, deploy and own their shift plans, which can be hard to imagine given that the delivery of the mine plan is in the co-ordination of that plan on a shift level.