In an XPAC database each record represents a mining block and each mining block may be made up of a number of material types. For example:

In addition to there being different material types in each mining block, there may also be different operations that you want to schedule. For example topsoil removal, drilling, blasting, ripping, mining, hauling, etc.

Theoretically, it is possible to schedule each operation for each material type, however this would tend to over-complicate your schedule. Usually only the critical operations for each material type are scheduled.

In XPAC these operations are called "productive activities".

Activities must be set up to represent any operation that you want to schedule for any material type. The number of activities is limited to 64 and you must have at least one defined in order to schedule. When you create a new project, one activity is assigned by default.

There is another type of activity defined within XPAC, called "non-productive activities". You can use non-productive activities to represent events that occur during the schedule, but which are not part of the production process. As with productive activities, non-productive activities are defined by you. Examples of non-productive activities include public holidays, major shut-downs, equipment walking, etc.