Sandvik has combined mine scheduling, blending and haulage in a single open-pit planning software

Deswik NOVA brings scheduling, blending and haulage decisions into the same environment to expose crushing, milling and haul-road bottlenecks before the shift starts — not after.

Sandvik, through its Deswik unit, launched NOVA, a new open-pit mine planning software. The launch took place on September 1, 2026, as part of the Future of Mining 2026 event hosted by Sandvik in Tampere, Finland. The tool joins the Deswik product line as an integrated planning layer, bringing together three disciplines that normally run in separate systems: mine scheduling, ore blending and haul fleet scheduling.

The problem NOVA is trying to solve is not a lack of planning data — open-pit mines have been producing mine schedules, blending plans and fleet schedules separately for decades. The problem is that these three layers rarely talk to each other within the same model, so a mine schedule can look perfectly executable on paper and still create a real bottleneck at the crusher, underutilization at the mill or congestion on the haul road that only shows up after the shift has already started. By running mining, blending and fleet scenarios together in the same environment, NOVA exposes this kind of planning friction during the simulation phase — before it turns into lost productivity in the field. This is a lesson any mine planner will recognize: most execution failures are not born from an error within one discipline, they are born at the boundary between disciplines that are not optimized together. It is the same logic behind the growing adoption of integrated planning platforms across the industry — reducing the number of manual handoffs between geology, mine planning and fleet operations teams, which is where most rework piles up. NOVA also connects to the rest of the Deswik ecosystem, signaling that Sandvik is betting on planning as a continuous flow from mine design to operations, rather than a sequence of files exported from one system to another.

For planning teams, the difference between a mine schedule validated in isolation and one validated together with blending and haulage is, in practice, the difference between discovering a problem in a simulation and discovering the same problem at a stalled crushing yard. As mines become more complex — multiple mining faces, multiple ore types, tighter blend targets to meet plant specifications — integrating these layers stops being a nice-to-have feature and becomes a mandatory operational risk management practice. For mine planning professionals, the key takeaway is that planning tools are shifting from discipline-specific calculators to shared decision environments, which also changes the most valued skill set: less about operating a single piece of software, more about interpreting scenarios that cut across geology, processing and logistics at the same time.