Aggregates Manager Digital Magazine
Issue link: http://read.dmtmag.com/i/803901
14 AGGREGATES MANAGER / April 2017 PLANT PROFILE hour and 4 million tons per year. Daily operations "We have about 35 employees on aver- age," says Darin Janikowski, Cemex's area manager for southern California. At the height of the market, he says the oper- ation had approximately 50 employees working on two shifts. That size crew was needed, as the plant experienced record sales in 2005-2006. Janikowski describes the downturn that followed as the worst he's seen. "I haven't seen it go back to where it was prior to the decline, but it's much better than it was in 2007," he says. There's no blasting at the site, the material is simply pushed down the slope by a dozer and scooped up by a loader. The loader then dumps the material into a hopper that feeds it onto a conveyor system that carries it to the surge pile in the processing plant. "We do that mainly for the purpose of blending the material," explains Rick Vasquez, plant manager, speaking of using a dozer in the pit. "There are differ- ent gradations of material. Quality wise, they're all the same, but there is a little bit of difference in color throughout the pit, so we use the dozer to blend and give us a better mix of material up at the plant. It's more consistent." At the plant, the material is screened and separated so that part of the material goes to the wash plant, and the rest of it goes to the dry crushing plant. The wash plant produces concrete sand, plaster sand, 1 1/2-inch gravel, 1-inch gravel, 3/8-inch gravel, and a 5/16-inch gravel byproduct. The dry crushed plant produces 3/4-inch crushed, 1/2-inch crushed, 3/8-inch crushed, and a rock dust. Most of the washed aggregate is for the ready-mix side of the company, and the crushed rock is used for hot- mix asphalt aggregate. Everything else depends on the customer. The plant supplies the local market, but probably 50 percent of the mate- rial produced at the plant is shipped internally to Cemex ready-mix operations, some as far away as San Juan Capistrano 70 miles to the south. This is because Lytle Creek has a 1 1/2-inch gravel that the ready-mix group needs but can't get from any of the company's other plants in the area. "This alluvial fan is good quality rock," Janikowski notes. "We produce a very hard gravel out of this site that meets a lot of Caltrans specs, so we get a lot of freeway work with our ready-mix. We can set the plant up to make any type of configuration the customer wants, and if we need to produce a large amount of a particular product, we'll start the plant up to produce that product." Employees at Lytle Creek have a six- day work week. The yard is open from 3 a.m. to 3 p.m. Monday through Friday, and 3 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Saturdays. The early start allows the ready-mix side to get its product early to avoid the heavy morning traffic in the area. "At one point in time, we were open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, back during the height of the market," Janikowski says. "There's talk about going back to operating 24 hours a day during the week just to help our ready- mix team get the material into their plants in a timely manner. Everything is shipped by highway out of this site. There is no rail infrastructure at all." The water utilized in the plant comes from the water district, as there is no well on site. All the water used in the plant is captured and reused, not just because of the drought conditions that have been present for several years in southern California, but because it's the right thing to do. All the drainage from the stockpiles goes to a water tank, and the water truck uses that to water the roads. A catch basin in the plant captures all the processing runoff and pumps it back to the water tank for the main plant. Continuous improvement Cemex began a continuous improvement program, Operational Excellence, in Florida in 2011. Since then, it has spread throughout the company. The program is designed to identify opportunities for improvement. "The focus is on customer centricity and to be sure that we're able to deliver value to our customers," says Erika Alba, continuous improvement manager for Cemex's southern California aggregates division. "Our objective is to be better every day. We see problems as opportu- nities, and use the opportunities to learn and improve. It is a culture. We center that around our four guiding principles — mindset, skillset, leadership, and collaboration. We empower our employ- ees. Our focus is to increase production and add value to our processes with a constant focus on safety." The continuous improvement Material is brought from the pit, dumped into a hopper, and transported via conveyor to the surge pile. From there, it is sized and separated. Part of it goes to the wash plant and part of it goes to the dry crushed plant.