Better Roads Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/85919
To view a video of Steve Cosper tell- ing Equipment World what he enjoys about construction, go to equipmentworld.com/digital or use your smartphone to scan the tag. Cosper's asphalt plant can burn four types of fuel. He chooses what's most cost effective depending on market prices. Get the freemobile app at http:/ /gettag.mobi experimentation helped them refi ne what they needed and what they expected out of the digital product offerings. The company sets up geofences at the asphalt plants and the job- sites to time when the trucks come and go and establish the most effi cient routes. If a driver detours from the route, or sits too long at the plant, quarry or job, the project manager is notifi ed. As with any paving operation, material delivery is a major cost component and an area of potentially big savings if you can manage and monitor it. "We saw that the cycles we'd run at the bid table were not the cycles we saw on the cost reports and we've been better able to monitor those," Cosper says. I think we've probably reduced our trucking expense anywhere from 10 to 14 percent with telematics. If you haul enough asphalt and stone, that's a big number." On the equipment side, all Gran- ite Contracting's graders and most of its dozers are set up with GPS machine control. "It al- lows you to do more with fewer people," Cosper says. "There are signifi - cant cost savings in the quickness and in reducing the number of people you have to have on the job." Getting suffi cient satel- lite signals to run GPS ma- chine control isn't always possible where Granite Contracting works. Trees, mountains, even tall buildings can compromise the integrity of the signals. So Cosper's strategy is to use GPS for rough grading and then set up a total station, but still run- ning on the same digital site model, for the fi nal passes. One of the biggest money savers Granite Contracting developed out While waiting for the trucks to arrive Cosper dis- cusses a job with paving foreman Todd Hemphill. Better Roads June 2012 35d