How much should we tighten our belts? - As the Drum Turns

Concrete Producer, The, May, 2003 by Jimmy Ambrose

Just last week we conducted a pre-pour conference with a flatwork contractor who's new to our area. His project is located in a high-traffic area near a large shopping mall. When our dispatchers heard we won the bid, they panicked. They know that deliveries to that area during regular business hours are a nightmare when they send more than just a few loads.

My goal at the conference was to find a way to prevent an operational failure. After I explained the situation, we settled in on some careful planning with the foreman and rescheduled his finishers and concrete pump to a different start time. The effort created a win-win situation. Our delivery costs for this project will be less than they would have been had we tried to make the deliveries during peak traffic times. We'll need fewer trucks because of deliveries being made in early morning pours. And the contractor will have lower labor costs for this job because fewer personnel will be needed to handle the faster pour rate.

With the possibility of an economic slowdown from the potential war in the Middle East, rising fuel prices, along with the possibility of yearly price increases in materials, every manager starts looking at cost-cutting measures. While everyone understands the reason, cost cutting are two words that no one likes to hear. When I think of cutting anything, I have the impression that someone is removing something important from the product. From my experience, whenever you start removing something from your product or service level, you are opening yourself up to lots of different problems.

For producers who have been in this business for any length of time, squeezing out profits in tough economic times isn't new. We know how to design products to achieve a proven performance level. Meeting this expectation level shouldn't mean we have to "cut" anything from the recipe. We should always be looking at ways to be more efficient.

Despite what you read in the papers or hear on TV talk shows, there is some business out there. While in some areas there are some companies who have trucks parked and plants idle, that's not the case by us. Fortunately in our area we are experiencing an up-turn in the local economy. A large auto manufacturing plant is adding on a new sport utility vehicle line, and support buildings are being built to house the materials to make the vehicle. Our local government is spending money from reserves to update the infrastructures, home building is still prominent, and yes, there are a few big industrial and commercial projects to build. We aren't getting the profit margins on a cubic yard of concrete that we have in the past, but at least we are still making money for our investors and owners.

This is a great time to lead our customers by example. Let's talk about the regular maintenance schedules we perform on our equipment to will keep expensive repair costs down. Let's show our customers that we are performing scale checks on our plants on a regular basis, demonstrating that we are making great performance mixes, which will keep you from the unnecessary loss of materials during batching operations. Let's keep the regular maintenance on fleets at high levels to increase their performance and cut down on unnecessary fuel consumption--even down to the proper inflation of tires.

With all the efforts our industry has made in improving our image, RMC 2000 comes to mind, I think it's important to project this to our customers even more now. All of these operational considerations I have mentioned are not new to the industry--we just might not have been paying as much attention to them in the past few years as we should have. We all have our particular areas of interests within the company structure and are proud and protective of them. Let's be more efficient in our duties, and try not to go through too many "cost-cutting" methods. And just as important let's help show our customers how our true value to their business success.

Let's get them talking about performance instead of costs.

--JIMMY AMBROSE
Hoover Concrete, LaVergne, Tenn.

fimambrose@aol.com