“This industry has something,” said Curtis Lederle of Trade Technologies. [the] Technology [industry] No: the actual impact of what you see and suggest. Photo: PamElla Lee Photography
The following transcript was adapted from one of two similar discussions held this year. Pitt and Quarry Round Table and Conference. The transcription of part 1 begins over here. Both lectures have been edited for brevity and clarity.
P&Q: With labor shortages lingering and existing plant and equipment fleets aging, many general manufacturers are investing to prepare their operations for the next decade. For manufacturers: What transformative tools and technologies are you investing in that you expect will grow your business? In what ways are you ‘doing more with less’ these days? Also, how are you going about buying here in 2022? For manufacturers, distributors and others: What investments are you making to make manufacturers more efficient or provide solutions? To all: AGG1 2022 was well attended, and ConExpo-Con/Agg 2023 is next March. What do you expect from ConExpo? Will manufacturers return in 2020 after largely bowing out of ConExpo? What new offerings should the industry expect at the trade show? Similarly, do your companies see June Hillhead and October Bauman as opportunities?
Curtis skin (Tread Technologies): As someone who has worked with tech companies in Silicon Valley, this industry has something that tech doesn’t: the tangible impact of what you see and suggest. That’s what I find most rewarding about working in this industry. So I think we’ll see [technology] Be much more digital and hopefully for all the right reasons.
Vale
Matthew Vale (HAULHUB TECHNOLOGIES): Large, public infrastructure owners are beginning to push digital from design to construction to full asset management. There is this massive shift in the industry to digitize the entire supply chain. And they are very happy to give that information to the children who come.
Infrastructure owners are leading this change with things like building information modeling, which is 15 to 20 years on the vertical side of things. It is now beginning to migrate into the horizontal construction sector.
Christian Randall (Haver and Bowker Niagara) In the past 10 to 20 years, our company has focused on the development of diagnostic equipment, especially to increase the safety of our manufacturers by preventive maintenance and machine longevity.
Two months ago we were at AGG1, and I noticed the need for technology. Demand for these types of devices has increased significantly since ConExpo. It seems to have been a complete shift. And I think we’ll have to see what happens over the next few years.
Sam Hampton (Visalogics) We were born to help alleviate what I call ‘data overload’. There are more boxes, more telematics, more connectors. There is data, data and even more data. If you own multiple fleets, people are just overwhelmed. How many different telematics solutions do I really need to log into?
The problem is that people go to ConExpo, where there’s a big push for technology. They are starting to build a full tech hub like CES there. People will happily come back, but the next morning you have to wake up and grind rocks. So I guess it’s a human element to bring talent into the organization.
With the clients we work with, we see that people are investing in elements that sit behind the screen, working with suppliers and leveraging the data. In the next five or six years, I think you’ll see a lot of entities behind the screens digging into the data.
Aselin
Amy Asselin (John Deere): In my time in the construction industry, the amount of technology and the speed at which it is coming has been amazing. There’s a lot of interest in using technology to be more productive, but the pace at which it’s coming is much faster than the ability for operations to know exactly how to use it—and to use it effectively.
As we’ve talked to smaller clients, their challenge with technology is really people who’ve been doing the business for 25 years asking, ‘Why do I need this?’ Their ability to put some of them to work to make their business better is certainly a purchase.
When you get to the big side, there is a lot of mixed lead integration; Many mergers and acquisitions. There’s a complexity to that – finding one report, one format. And so the ability to combine all these is very challenging.
Corey Danner (ARCOSA AGGREGATES): We will be at ConExpo-Con/Agg. It’s great to see what everyone in this class produces. At AGG1, it’s a great training opportunity for our teams.
From the product side to the technology, are we excited about it? yes. But we don’t know what we want until you show us. We’re trying to figure out the best way to do that and bring technology there.
Most of the people in this department, as a customer, support the technology. [critical] And not just ‘how to use it’. I mean, we can pick that up relatively quickly. We can give a 3-year-old an iPad, and they know how to use it. But when the iPad breaks, we get fried.
So you sold us this next piece of crap and we waited six months for our half million dollar machine because IT doesn’t work. And there is one person in the country who knows how to fix it. So what do we do? This 10 cent fuse shuts us down no matter what if we can’t get the support, if we can’t get the supplies and if we can’t get the education.
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