The tale of the well-travelled ABE editor

Trips to Finland, Portugal, Italy, France and Germany – as well as to 427 Hillhead 2016 in Buxton, England – since the last issue of Aggregates Business Europe. It’s been a busy time for yours truly and it’s given me a great chance to visit a huge number of large, medium and small companies operating within the quarrying equipment sector.

Some of what I’ve seen and gained insight into will appear inside this edition of the magazine, and there’s much more material from these trips that will be turned into articles in the last two editions of ABE before the end of 2016.

What has been very interesting is seeing the growing importance of plant automation, including the use of drone data management solutions, in the efficient running of a quarry site. You’ll read in this issue how a new €32 million state-of-the-art automated plant installed for CMGO (402 Colas) at one of its plants in Brittany, France is delivering big efficiency and overall operational savings for what is a well-known and highly respected company within the French aggregates sector.

Later in the year you’ll read my analysis of the drone data management market for quarries. What struck me during a visit to one large quarry in northern France, near the border with Belgium, that was working with drones in order to gather material stockpile value calculations, haul road safety data and other key information via a specific software interface platform, was the number of different drones available for quarry-based applications and the ease with which you can access and navigate around genuinely useful data sets, as well as 2D and 3D onsite images. Another striking aspect of drone data management systems is that you can access on your laptop, PC, tablet or smartphone onsite gathered and analysed data within 24 hours of each drone flight.

As I’ve mentioned previously in my Comment piece, I have a very large soft spot for Italy. So my four-day road trip visiting ten successful quarry-related product manufacturers during July was not only highly interesting and informative, but also a real pleasure. Crushing and screening-related companies, quarry plant automation solution firms, washing and water treatment plant manufacturers, weighing solution companies, and dust suppression system firms were among OEMs visited in a trip through Lombardy, Emilia-Romagna, Le Marche, Veneto and Trentino-Alto Adige.

What struck me when visiting crushing and screening-related firms in southern Le Marche is how so many manufacturers, including 1796 Baioni and 408 Crifi, are based in the same small geographical area. It reminded me of the similar high level of OEMs with great crushing and screening expertise that you find around Loch Neagh in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland.

In the Quarry Profile in this issue, we take a look at the highly successful stone product company Solancis and their use of a leading OEM’s wheeled loaders, excavators and ADTs for their highly efficient quarry-based limestone block loading and hauling. Within the Profile you’ll find an emphasis, once again, on the importance of quality machine telematics in modern quarrying, with, in this case, great emphasis having been placed on the use of telematics to help significantly reduce a particular Solancis quarry fleet’s idling time.

Martin Riley became senior vice president of 868 Tarmac, the UK building materials giant, in early 2016. A leading industry figure, I’m sure you’ll find our Interview piece in which he offers his perspective on how best to develop skilled workers for the sustainable building materials sector of great interest.