Expertly Meeting RMX Demand With Competing Forces at Play
By: Jason Campbell | Commercial Director NA West | Sysdyne Technologies, LLC.
One of the biggest challenges we face in our industry is meeting demand while dealing with two significant and often competing forces at work. The positive demand-side force is growth – and we’ve seen explosive growth in our industry over the last several years. The negative supply-side force is extreme constraints. These constraints are on the delivery side (driver shortage) and on the material side (shortages and allocations). Combining all these forces results in a recipe for some pain.
Let’s double-click into the supply-side constraints:
- If you go by any kind of material yard, trucking company, ready mix plant, or aggregate terminal, you’re going to see now hiring signs. Job fairs abound. Sign-on bonuses are featured. Drivers cannot be replenished fast enough, be paid enough, or stick around long enough. All the while, our highly experienced generation of drivers is beginning to retire.
- As current supply chain conditions persist, the risk of cement,aggregate, and other material stock-outs grow. Hedging this by over-ordering is costly from a working capital and cash flow perspective, but also causes a misallocated truck balance – when you have too many trucks at one plant and not enough at another.
Though it may seem a potential changing economic climate could relieve some of this pressure (no one seems to know exactly what’s going to happen) the need to control and cut waste will continue to be a top priority. When searching for solutions there is a recurring theme that keeps bubbling to the surface – a lack of actionable information. I believe the number one problem that is exacerbating supply chain waste, the lack of drivers and/or raw materials, is visibility. Knowing what everyone else in the supply chain knows, all at the same time, will begin to address these constraint challenges while positioning people for greater success.
A cloud-native system purpose-built for Ready Mix producers is the game-changer.
A modern, simple to use, and interoperable software platform ensures all the relevant stakeholders know everything needed to be successful. For example, concrete orders are in the dispatch systems. The quantity of materials on hand by plant are in the batch systems. And now, sitting on top, is an analytics tool that connects the dots from across the operations and serves up all the information needed (anywhere and on most any device) to overcome constraint challenges in an intelligent and efficient manner.
A cloud-native solution is capable of adding a near infinite number of variables – in addition to identifying material inventories on hand, seeing your rate of usage in real-time across any number of plants allows people to make better decisions earlier in the process. This visibility extends to trucks and being able to better utilize a truck’s full capacity and adjust appropriately in events unfold.
Want to learn more? Sysdyne offers the only cloud-native platform purpose built for the Ready Mix Concrete industry: https://sysdynetechnologies.com/solutions/
