Rock Products

MAY 2015

Rock Products is the aggregates industry's leading source for market analysis and technology solutions, delivering critical content focusing on aggregates-processing equipment; operational efficiencies; management best practices; comprehensive market

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20 • ROCK products • May 2015 www.rockproducts.com T here is nothing worse in the aggre- gate business than loading the wrong materials into the wrong truck. The time and money lost from wrong loads, overloaded trucks and wasted material during the load-out process at quarry operations is becoming a thing of the past thanks to a new technology that uses GeLo Bluetooth Low Energy beacons and a mobile app. Palm Beach Aggregates in West Palm Beach, Fla., mines and processes 2 million tpy of material for the Florida construction industry, including sand, coral, limestone, course and fine mate- rials for asphalt, cement and concrete and building foundation materials. But errors were occurring with the company's paper dispatching system for trucks and loaders. Finding a Solution "Trucks were being loaded from a doz- en different material stations and over- loads or incorrect material loads often occurred," said Steve Rasmussen, part- ner for TACInsight, a three-year-old IT-services and software-automation company for the trucking and con- struction industries. To solve the problem and reduce load- ing time, TACInsight created a Bluetooth beacon and mobile communication sys- tem for the company that insures load- er operators are armed with the same dispatch information available to the scale house dispatchers. With a coded Bluetooth beacon on ev- ery truck for identification, the system verifies the truck has pulled up in front of the correct material station and tracks in real time how long the load- ing to departure process takes. All of the necessary information for a truck and its load is in the hands of the load- er operator on his electronic tablet. "Our client wanted a simple mobile app that would track and transmit dispatch information that let the loader opera- tors know the right truck was being loaded with the correct material and quantity," Rasmussen said. Finding a Source The beacons are from GeLo Inc., a national manufacturer that builds Rocking the Right Load Mobile Communication System Keeps Palm Beach Aggregates Rolling. By Mark S. Kuhar PALM BEACH AGGREGATES Palm Beach Aggregates in West Palm Beach, Fla., mines and processes approximately 2 million tpy of material.

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