<p>Blasts are designed to achieve an optimal fragmentation which balances drill and blast costs with downstream costs in loading, hauling, crushing, and grinding. During the rush of production, especially in cases where blasted muck is the bottleneck due to excess shovel, truck, and milling availability, the drill and blast design compliance is often overlooked or not at all tracked. While heterogeneity in the ability to blast a rock cannot be controlled, the blast design compliance can be, and as the deviation from design increases, more unexpected fragmentation being either too fine or coarse is encountered resulting in an overall value loss. Here, a workflow for assessing drill and blast design compliance is presented allowing the practitioner to determine the economic impact of suboptimal fragmentation resulting from blast design noncompliance. A synthetic 500-hole blast design is tested under a perfect, typical, and poor design compliance scenario where drilled positions and hole lengths are varied, creating distinct blasthole level fragmentation results modeled with Kuz–Ram. The drill and blast and downstream costs are compared in the three scenarios resulting in an increase in total cost from 13.9 $/t in the perfect case to 14.5 $/t (4.3%) in the typical scenario, and 15.5 $/t (11.5%) in the poor design compliance scenario. Practitioners could apply this workflow to baseline their current drill and blast design compliance, define redrilling and backfilling tolerances, and employ new technologies or best practices to continuously improve blasting fragmentation outcome.</p>