Total cost of ownership
Every yellow field below is an estimate you should replace with the customer's own figures. The numbers only carry weight when they come from their operation, not ours. Work through the four steps and the business case builds itself.
The machine
Pick the dig machine. Specs load from public OEM data and every figure stays editable, so if the customer runs different buckets or rates, change it on the spot.
The commodity
What the machine digs decides what an hour of downtime costs. Pick the commodity, or jump in from a region preset, then correct the grade and price to the customer's operation.
The incident
A rock through an unguarded cylinder means a changeout. The machine stops, and on most sites the dig unit is the priority asset, so lost hours are lost tonnes. Ask them: how long is a changeout, and how much of that production do you actually get back?
The ChromeGuard case
Enter the kit investment from the quote, installed, in the working currency. Pricing lives in quotes and proposals, never in public content, which is why this field starts empty.
The cost of doing nothing
Year one, side by side
Five years, cumulative
Every number, justified
Assumptions, data sources and how to keep prices current
Currency: the tool works in one currency at a time, AUD by default, and any currency is supported. Preset rates per 1 USD, mid-market 13-14 July 2026: AUD 1.44, CLP 933, PEN 3.40, ZAR 16.49, IDR 18,058, BRL 5.13. For anything else pick "Other", type the code and rate, and hit Apply. Commodity benchmarks are USD spot, converted at the working rate. Switching currency converts every money field at these rates, so set currency and rate first and enter all figures, including the kit quote, in the working currency.
Commodity prices are USD spot benchmarks as at 14 July 2026: gold ~$4,020/oz, silver ~$58.25/oz, copper ~$6.26/lb (COMEX), iron ore 62% Fe ~$98.86/t, zinc ~$3,616/t (LME), nickel ~$16,548/t (LME), Newcastle thermal coal ~$128/t. Markets move, so check before a meeting using the live price link that appears next to the price field for each commodity (Trading Economics). Every price is editable.
Machine specs come from public OEM data (Komatsu, Hitachi, Liebherr, Caterpillar published specifications). Bucket ratings vary by configuration (shovel vs backhoe) and site-specific buckets are common, so treat the preloaded capacity as a starting point and confirm against the customer's fleet. The Cat 6040 figure is a class-typical estimate, verify against the customer's spec sheet.
Production model: tonnes per hour = bucket capacity × fill factor × loose material density × cycles per hour × operating efficiency. Loose (in-bucket) density defaults are set per commodity. The customer's actual dig rate always beats the model, so use the override field when they know it.
Commodity value converts grade, recovery and price into revenue per tonne of product mined. For iron ore and coal it uses product yield × price, reflecting direct-shipping style operations. These are deliberately simple models for a sales conversation, not a resource statement.
Strip ratio is just this: how many tonnes of waste the machine moves for every 1 tonne of product it digs. At 2:1, one bucket in three earns money and the rest is overburden, so when the machine goes down, only the money-earning share of its digging counts as lost revenue. Waste time is valued at zero, which understates the true cost of waste delays (deferred access, resequencing, idle trucks), and that is deliberate: a conservative number survives scrutiny. Default 2:1. A dedicated ore digger feeding the crusher is 0. The customer's mine plan has the real ratio, ask for it.
Incident cost defaults lean on ChromeGuard's company profile: roughly 12 hours of downtime per changeout, up to $50k in parts and labour, and up to $500k in lost revenue per incident, with "production actually lost" defaulted to 50% to stay conservative where fleets can partially catch up.
What this tool deliberately leaves out: safety exposure of the changeout itself (working under a raised boom is high-risk work), knock-on truck fleet idling, and contract penalty exposure. If the customer raises them, that only strengthens the case.
ChromeGuard total cost of ownership tool. Defaults are conservative estimates for discussion, not a quotation or a guarantee of outcomes. Replace the defaults with the operation's own figures for a result that reflects the site. Kit investment is entered per quote.
ChromeGuard | Total cost of ownership summary
Prepared with the ChromeGuard TCO calculator (v1.4.3). Estimates for discussion based on figures entered during the meeting. Not a quotation. Commodity price defaults as at 14 July 2026 unless edited.