Grading and Excavation Contractor

Managing Time, Boosting Profits

One contractor solves engine-hour underreporting and cuts cycle times with the help of telematics.

By John Trotti

Rogers Group Inc., a Tennessee-based contractor, has over 1,500 pieces of heavy highway equipment—everything from skid-steer loaders to pavers to excavators. The company is also the nation’s largest privately owned producer of crushed stone, having 50 rock quarries from which it produces sand, gravel, asphalt, stone, and agricultural limestone. The contractor side of the business primarily provides aggregates and highway construction services to the south-central US through facilities in Alabama, Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, and Tennessee.

The Tennessee-based Rogers Group provides over 1,500 pieces of heavy highway equipment.

For years, Director of Equipment Operations Cameron Druyor suspected underreporting of engine hours on the company’s equipment used for highway construction. He believed that human error was the probable cause, and as a result he was also sure that the company was underestimating costs when bidding on new projects. If his suspicions were correct, a large portion of the profits was being eaten up each year as a result of underbidding on jobs. Within time, he also discovered problems related to the construction equipment at the Rogers Group’s rock quarries—cycle-time challenges and low job productivity.

The Test
To test his intuition about underreporting of engine hours—and after an evaluation of five wireless equipment-monitoring products—he installed Qualcomm’s GlobalTRACS equipment management system on 13 pieces of equipment. He chose Qualcomm over the other systems because, Druyor says, “It kept coming back to product durability and the strength and market presence of Qualcomm.” Several months into the trial, the data confirmed his suspicions that manual underreporting of engine hours was significant—up to a 50% variance in many cases!

The Solution
Satisfied with the results of the test, Druyor presented his findings to executives, only to learn that the GlobalTRACS system faced another test. A separate group in the company was already using a competing equipment-monitoring product to conduct Six Sigma (business-improvement) studies to help reduce production cycle times at the company’s rock quarries. Cycle time is the measure of the amount of time that a 50- to 100-ton haul truck requires to transport rock from a quarry pit to a crusher and return for another load. The executives agreed to let Druyor carefully evaluate the two equipment-monitoring solutions, and in the end the GlobalTRACS system was selected again because Qualcomm tailored a solution specifically designed to meet the unique need of Rogers Group. Qualcomm worked with a third-party software developer to download the data directly to a server for processing by the company’s operating system. Now onsite managers never have to leave their in-house system to monitor cycle times.

The system allows managers to pinpoint the average cycle time of each driver.

Improved Cycle Times
Once the system was installed on equipment used at the company’s rock quarries, onsite managers were able to graph the previous day’s cycle times for each piece of machinery. This allowed managers to pinpoint the average cycle time that was used to measure the productivity of each driver, and the product cycle times soon began to decrease and become more consistent. “By displaying graphs of the previous day’s cycle times,” Druyor explains, “our drivers are able to judge how they performed in relation to our established baseline and to each other. In some cases, we had an increase of 100 to 150 tons per hour produced per quarry without adding equipment or working additional hours. In fact, one quarry was able to go from a five-day to a four-day product week and still easily meet its quota.”

The Results
Rogers Group purchased additional GlobalTRACS units this year for the Six Sigma studies, and Druyor has returned to his original project of installing units to track engine hours. Over 300 pieces of equipment have the system installed. He’s now incorporating fuel monitoring and alerts for maintenance tracking, and he’s been very impressed with the results so far. He and his team receive alerts via e-mail or text message if a machine’s engine is running hot for improved preventative maintenance, reduced costs, and what he hopes in the future will help to eliminate breakdowns altogether. The system also helped the company discover when one of its boom trucks was stolen from a construction project in North Carolina. An alert indicated that the truck had moved outside of a preset virtual GPS boundary, and the company was able to contact law enforcement.

Druyor is also happy to finally know, without a doubt, that his intuition was correct and that his company is benefiting from the right technology, at just the right time.

The results speak for themselves: improvement in accuracy of engine-hours reporting, reduction in quarry cycle times, increased cycle-time consistency, increased worker productivity, and more accurate bid estimates. The Rogers Group has benefited from these results by saving considerable man-time, which in turn has helped to increase job productivity and profits.

John Trotti is the editor of Grading & Excavation Contractor magazine.

GEC - November/December 2007

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