Grading & Excavation Contractor magazine has five siblings: Distributed Energy, Erosion Control, MSW Management, Stormwater, and Water Efficiency, and while the subjects are relatively diverse, the core concerns our readers face—regulations, people problems, and productivity issues—are remarkably similar.
It doesn’t much matter what your field of endeavor is, the regulatory environment and its oversight activities are on a one-way street heading to increases in both. After grumping for a bit, either you deal with them or try another business. Tempting as that may sound, you’re not apt to find the situation or its overseers better or more accommodating than the ones you’d like to leave behind.
As for people problems, they too are different and never ending, often requiring unique and sometimes contradictory responses on your part…and rarely arriving at what any of the parties would consider satisfactory conclusions. In business, whether you’re dealing with your employees, customers, or confederates, a stalemate is often the closest thing to a victory you’re likely to see.
But in productivity you face a battle in which you must have a winning strategy to stay in business. Moreover, for your strategy to be successful, it cannot be fixed but instead must recognize that the field of battle is dynamic and changes with each passing day.
Think back to hardly more than a decade ago, when a satisfying increase in productivity might have been measured in response to such factors as “five percent more breakout force for your bucket” or “twelve percent more glass area in your cab.” It’s not that such improvements were trivial then (or even in today’s tight margin business environment), but look at what’s happened since we entered the new millennium.
At the turn of the century, mechanical linkages connected us to the working parts of our machines, a situation that took both strength and years of experience to develop the finesse to achieve the first-pass performance that is so much more quickly available today thanks to the electro-hydraulic systems in today’s equipment.
Machine-control systems, which had existed for quite some time in the mining industry, began making their way into construction early in the last decade, but connecting all the dots from the plan to the finished project proved to be no easy task. What we had was what amounted to a digital relay race where the baton passed from a heavy-duty engineering platform through what was basically survey equipment, then on to the machine, where its digital magic commanded the attention of pumps, lines, and cylinders to deliver position information to the blades or buckets that actually perform their tasks.
Despite continual improvements to laser and GPS systems and the deployment of off-the-shelf plumbing and connection hardware for the machines themselves, the adoption rates remained low despite general recognition that machine control offered huge productivity benefits. Thus as the decade came to an end with more than enough experience in the bank to draw upon, to all but the most techno-savvy contractors the process of getting from file to blade remained a daunting task.
To some extent, the difficulty lay in the disconnect between the suppliers and users in the “features versus benefits” arena. Lacking systems and people to bridge the gap, contractors found themselves between a rock and a hard spot. Yes, they knew where the future lay, but the road to get there was not well marked and was too expensive to chance without some certainty of success…and it was here that the vendors had to set their sights.
During the last three years, the industry experienced an outpouring of new and/or innovative developments in machinery, adaptive technologies, software, data transmission, systems integration, training, and contractor support to the point where the digital job site is no longer notional, but real.
Nothing could have driven the point home more indelibly to me than World of Concrete 2013, this past month, where attendees mobbed the west half of the Las Vegas Convention Center’s Central Hall, scrambling to get a look at the latest software and productivity equipment on display.
My response at the time was that while there was no doubt that technology systems-particularly the software-had undergone incredible improvements over the past year, the real takeaway was that the show’s attendees recognized their relevance to productivity and were chomping at the bit to see how to incorporate them into their own operations.
So what does this mean? To me it’s that the lid is off on the absolute necessity for you to get your technology ducks in a row. Every day you delay, you’re handing your competitors a piece of your company’s success on a platter.