80. Giatec SmartMix

Griff and Lex discuss our new quality control software, plus fiber balls, extra truck wash lane, and a brief note on last week’s break-in.

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SPEAKER_00 0:09

Welcome to Loaded, the Han Ready Mix Podcast with Griffin Hahn and Lex Hahn and no Andrea today. She's off being like, I think they make Netflix shows about the pageant moms that are just like really crazy and uh she'll fit right in. Yeah, I yep, yep. So she's off being a pageant mom and probably starring in a Netflix show. Yeah. Yeah, like dance moms for pageants. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I could see it. Yeah. So that's fun. Busy day today. Busy week it's been. Very. Yeah. And beat. When you're beat, you have uh your caffeine uh pouches. Yeah, thanks for snitching, dude. It's just caffeine, right? Yeah, no. Uh so yeah, it's been a it's been a long week, but it's been good to to be hustling and and uh I think that's gonna continue for a little while. So yeah, I hope so.

SPEAKER_01 1:09

Makes it makes the week go by and gives you a sense of purpose. So it's a good thing. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:15

Um any announcements you've got this week before we get into our topic? I think I saved all of them for you. Okay, great. As many of you might have heard, especially in the Quad Cities, we had a break-in last weekend. So this is gonna drop on uh Tuesday after Labor Day, so it'd be two weekends um previous at this point. There was some some chatter and some concern that um that might have been done by an employee because they got in where there were tools that it would seem like it would be hard to know that was there. But we're pretty confident after looking at over the video evidence and the fact that they took some tablets, which any employee would know has GPS on them, uh, that it was nobody from the organization that was part of that break-in. So just wanted to clear that up in case that any of that concern was still out there. Um, I don't think uh we we definitely don't think there's anybody that works here that was involved with that. It was just some some bad actors from outside, and and hopefully the police are um are working on it and uh can handle that situation. So wanted to clear that up. Also, some good news. I know that, especially in Davenport, the truck wash stations are pretty much always full. And there's people that want to work on their trucks, and there's there they just don't want to sit around and wait for uh those truck wash stations to open up. So we have been working on and and I should be ready very soon, if not already by the time this comes out, getting four spots. So inside the wash bay and then just outside on the adjoining wall, um, that we'll be able to wash trucks there as well. So be able to wash four trucks at once instead of two. So trying to eliminate any barriers from people that want to keep their trucks clean, and hopefully that's everyone. And um, so let me know how that's going. Um and and we'll continue to try to make that situation better. Finally, we've had kind of a weird thing. We've had some customers complaining about fiber balls with our microfiber, the AC50 uh microfiber. We've never really had this happen before, so we don't know why it's popped up all of a sudden here in the last couple weeks. But one thing we want to make sure that we are doing is the best practice of adding fiber. So we always want to be adding fiber after the load is in the truck. And then we need to get 90 full revolutions before we leave the yard at full charge to break up that fiber. So please make sure you're doing that. If you're a driver, if you're a batcher, make sure you're instructing drivers to do that. And we'll keep working the problem if it keeps showing up. We want to make sure we're at least doing best practices and getting all that right. Make sense, Lex. Sure does. Okay, great. Great. Well, what do you want to talk about today? Without Andrea, we had to scramble for uh content.

SPEAKER_01 4:15

Yeah, a little bit, but I think our meeting before this is a great segue into our podcast for the day.

SPEAKER_00 4:22

Yeah. Well, it's it's very much up your alley, so why don't you announce what we got going on?

SPEAKER_01 4:27

Over the next, I would say, couple months, we will be implementing uh quality control software called Geotech Smart Mix. It'll be a great thing, I think, for this team. Yeah. So and we can kind of get into that, but uh well needed.

SPEAKER_00 4:42

Yeah, it's been a long time coming. I think we we've built a lot of uh useful and uh you know, we we had a lot of the tools we needed uh built on Excel sheets, um, which worked, but made it so like our quality control file on uh the the system is a it's like a bird's nest.

SPEAKER_01 5:04

It's gotten a little cleaned up, but yeah, you have 20,000 items, it's pretty hard to sort things out. Right. And I would say the biggest part too is that none of these really communicate with each other. So like it you can't get an Excel file to communicate. So yeah, uh it'll be ha it'll be nice to have all the information in one place and being able to communicate with each other.

SPEAKER_00 5:25

Yeah. Yeah. So I I kind of view it as it's gonna be a repository of information for us and then provide us with a number of tools to help us be better. Yes. Um, and uh everyone knows that I like to nerd out about concrete mixes, and so does Lex. So I think both of us are pretty excited about this. But um, so uh essentially the software will be our source of truth, which means the place where the actual mix designs are stored for our company, the secret recipe book uh will be in this smart mix software. So that will flow into command uh and then into the batch panels. So we're we're adding an extra layer to keep all of our mixes in one spot. It'll keep batch records, and you know, when we have water-added reports, um cylinder breaks, aggregate gradations, maturity data, moistures, all that stuff will be able to be kept in the software in a kind of a one-stop shop, which will be pretty nice.

SPEAKER_01 6:28

Yeah. Uh I don't know where I was going, but you talked about being excited about uh mixed designs and being a concrete nerd, and I said, I really think that the most exciting thing to me is having somewhere where I can organize things and have a way that we can make mass changes because making mass changes is in command is annoying and not easy.

SPEAKER_00 6:57

No, it's really challenging with the very 1980s command series uh software. So yeah, we'll we'll be able to make bulk mix changes. So what that means is, for example, this has happened over the last couple of years, right? If we have a specific gravity, which um is the the weight of like let's say rock versus water, right? So if we've been getting rock for a while that is uh a 2.7 specific gravity, um, that means it's 2.7 times heavier than water. And then they get into a new seam and it's 2.65 and it's just a little bit lighter, we have to make adjustments for that in our mixed designs. And if it's happening to, let's say out allied stone, um, if it's happening to, let's say, allied stone, we can, or that affects you know, most of our mixed designs. So we would have to go and change almost every mix design. And this will allow us to do that with a kind of a click of the button. We say, okay, this stone is now a little bit lighter. Here's what the new specific gravity is, and recalibrate all of our mixes so that they yield correctly and have the same volume of rock in the mix as they did before. So all that will happen automatically and save us so, so, so much uh time and energy. So I'm really excited about that. It also does a lot of tools with mixed designing, right? So we have Excel spreadsheets that create these uh these charts that we can look at making a mixed design, like a power, what's called a power 45 curve or a tarantula curve or a shillstone chart. And all these things will be kind of already in the mixed design. And so when you start making a new mixed design, it's going to show up right away. So we have great visibility and will help us uh make that mixed design as good as it possibly can right from the get-go. Some of the other things, it's got plant batch analytics, so we'll be able to keep a closer eye on plant accuracies uh in the batching processes. And then one big thing for Lex is uh basically instant submittals. Yeah, that'll be nice. That's gonna save a ton of time. All the information in one spot. Yeah. It'll be great. Well, I think a lot of people probably don't know, but like every time, almost every new job we start, especially a commercial job, we have to submit the mix design and all in you know, data for all the ingredients in that mix design to an engineer, along with like the mixed performance and um just a lot of times it's a 20 to 30 page packet of information, and we have to submit it on every job. Sometimes it's a five-yard job, and we have to put there's more pages to the submittal than there are yards we're gonna deliver. And uh, so that takes up a lot of Lex's time, and Brian does a lot too. And this will be nice that you can just type in the project name and the plan it's coming from and what mixed design, and bam, there'll be a submittal to use. So that should be really, really nice.

SPEAKER_01 10:04

Kind of going back to the batching analytics of tolerances and stuff. I think this will be very important because then we can get with our maintenance team and um go back and say, hey, we're this far out on this plant. Why is that? How do we become more efficient with our our plants, with our powders, with our aggregate, whatever, with the gate systems just to get there. So I think that's a good tool we'd never have had before.

SPEAKER_00 10:30

So allow us to really I I believe we'll see when we get into it, but I think there's like a a timing aspect so we can see like you know, how long is it taking to weigh up certain materials of certain plants, so we could get time efficiency. But then also, I mean, if you think about it, like if we overweighed one percent overweighed rock across our company every day on every load, I mean the dollars amount with buying one percent extra rock are astronomical, they're huge. So really excited about about being able to watch that closer. And and and our tolerances are close, but we just don't have a way to monitor them with this kind of visibility. Um, so that'll be really cool. And then one of the things, and one of the reasons why we picked this software versus others, is they were one of the first to come out with a artificial intelligence kind of piece to the software. So they have an agent within the software called Roxy. And Roxy was trained on, I think they had like 100,000 yards of concrete. Um, maybe it was, maybe it was a million yards of concrete at this point, trained on performance. So it had seen a million yards of concrete that it knew how much what the ingredients were that went into the concrete, what the strength results were, you know, slump, air content, all those things. That's full data on. Um and so it can learn about concrete in general. And and as we build out our data set with it, we'll be able to learn about how our materials perform, and we'll be able to predict performance of all of our mixed designs. And why that's really important is we have like 2,500 mixed designs. And some of them we use every day, and we are very, very confident in exactly what the performance is gonna be because we use it all the time. There's others that we haven't used in five years, and what we tend to do is really overdesign on a lot of those seldomly used mixes so that we're comfortable, right? We want to be able to sleep at night that we know how this mix is going to perform. Well, with this AI, we'll be able to kind of zero in on performance significantly better. So um it may look at our 2500 mix designs and say, hey, these 100, this is too expensive for what you're trying to achieve with them, right? We can we can make this a more economical mix design by making these changes. Um, and then others that may say, hey, you have kind of an engineering risk that this mix, for example, maybe doesn't have enough cement in it and and it wasn't something that caught our eye and says, you know, we predict that this is not going to be good enough. And then those predictions get more and more accurate the more information we give Roxy, and then we can, you know, do trial batches and determine what changes we need to make and and um and then that information creates a next iteration of projections and and recommendations. So it's really cool as a way to look at our entire mixed design offering and and try to improve them kind of one by one, but looking at them all at once. It's way too big of an effort for any people to really handle, right? You you can't look at that many mixes and go, uh, I found I found all the ones that could it could take some adjusting, but um putting an AI to to that task is is really exciting. Holy shit.

SPEAKER_01 14:01

Uh you know what I'm excited about that with? Might be some good mixes to inactivate. Oh yeah, we can get rid of mixes, um, kind of find our core of where we need to be, and then kind of focus our energy towards those mixes and kind of get rid of some that we haven't used. And they are overdesigned, so there's is there any point for us to continue to use them? Um, obviously there's specialty products, projects more than that, that will need specialty mixes, but uh, I think it'll really help us zero down on what's important and yeah, what we need to focus on.

SPEAKER_00 14:37

And it I think it can also help us do better from a theoretical standpoint, looking at it and say, okay, this mix, we want this mix to be a five-inch slump, and it will be able to tell us ahead of time, like there isn't enough water in this mix to reach a five-inch slump, or you're gonna have to bump up the chemical admixtures. So it'll it'll give us some heads up that'll save us some time with trial batching and help us be more accurate on the site for our customers as well. So it's not just strength optimization, it's aggregate gradation optimization, it's slump optimization, uh, it's workability and performance, it's uh it's all of that, right? So yeah, I think it's gonna be really, really neat. So you might be saying, okay, so what changes with this? You know, we think we're gonna have greater visibility into our mix performance, our plant batch consistency, uh, which is gonna mean less waste, less rejected yards, less overdesign. It's gonna make the company more more profitable and do a better job for our customers. So it's gonna be a good thing. I'm excited. We have a lot of software and and general things happening right now, and so we're just piling more on, but uh this one's gonna be worthwhile for sure. Agreed. Excellent. Thanks for your help, Max. You said it. All right, I don't need to add anything. Okay. Well, we can leave this short and sweet unless you have anything else you want to talk about. I think that we cut it off. We did a good job. Excellent. Well, thank you for listening to Load It, the Han ReadyMix podcast. Please make sure you spread the word with your coworkers that uh this is the the best place to get good information about the happenings of Han ReadyMix. So catch you next time. See you next time.