LOADRITE Helps Quarry Increase Market Share
A large quarry based in Cupertino, California, USA, uses LOADRITE to get a competitive advantage. The quarry owns 20 of the 250 trucks that cycle through each day. It loads out between 500 to 800 trucks daily. The site has a quarry and a recycling business. The site is situated a near a fixed highway patrol scale and fines typically range from US$300 to US$1,000 per citation based on US$100 for each 1000kg over the legal load. A lot of the quarry's business is from casual customers, because it supplies a wide range of goods, including recycled products, not available from competitors. So if a customer is undertaking demolition and construction work, they can carry loads in both directions, dropping off a load of concrete to be crushed and recycled at the quarry recycling plant and return to their work site with a load of virtually any material. The quarry also offers a delivery service to its customers, so at short notice, the customer can have materials delivered urgently to a site using the quarry's own trucks.
The Quarrying Process
Each truck entering the quarry goes directly to the scale house and registers the tare weight. The causal customer weighs in on the first trip of the day and regular customers check their truck tare weight once a month. The truck driver requests products by type and weight, at the scale house, which are radioed to the loader operator. The truck then drives to the correct stockpile where it is loaded to its requirements by the loader operator, using LOADRITE. It then leaves the quarry via the weighbridge where it receives a printed ticket with the job number, billing details, truck load weight, product, and hauler identification number. The quarry uses LOADRITE scales for all load-out operations, loading both their customers' and their own haul trucks. It operates between eight to ten LOADRITE scales and the recycling operation uses one. The current policy is to fit every new load-out loader with a LOADRITE scale.
Before LOADRITE
Before the quarry used LOADRITE, trucks were forever being overloaded. This meant that they would drive to the weighbridge find out they were over tare and have to drive back to the stockpile to tip off and be reloaded. 10 to 15% of trucks were overloaded when checked at the scale house. This caused congestion at the weighbridge and turnarounds from the scale house to the load-out area. At the time they were producing about 1,100 truckloads per day at the quarry. Although the quarry opened at 7am, trucks would line up to get into the quarry at 6am to so that they could be loaded first and get back to the weighbridge before the queue formed. Sometimes the queue could be 25 to 30 trucks long. As the truck drivers are paid by the load any delay costs the quarry or the customer in lost time. The foreman of the smaller site did not think he needed any loader scales because of the small size of the operation so trucks were loaded without. The operator would count bucket loads in his head. This sometimes meant that trucks were overloaded and had to return from the scale house to be reloaded.
LOADRITE Reduces Truck Turnaround Time
LOADRITE was the answer. Two LOADRITE Pro systems were installed on Leach's Caterpillar 962G machines. All trucks entering Leach's facility can be now be loaded to the correct weight first time - reducing truck turnaround times and queues at the weighbridge.
“Ten years ago the quarry had a 10% market share in the area. The VP of the quarry estimates that they now have better than a 50% market share. They target a maximum turnaround time of 15 minutes for all customers. Typically they achieve a ten minute turnaround due to LOADRITE increasing truck turnaround time.”