What is the true ROI of applying technology to your workplace? And how can you get your operators to adopt it?
A recent panel of contractors revealed how they made technology work – and the many ways it has improved nearly every aspect of their business.
The seven-person panel, held during Caterpillar’s recent Construction and Technology Days event, included: Shay Stutsman, Stutsman Gerbaz Inc.; James Bennett, Otto Baum Company Inc.; Bryce Wuori, Pavewise; Tyler Flynn, Savage; Robert Gaines Blackwell, Partners Excavating Company; Justin Spates, Luck Stone; and Curtis Blank Jr., Associated Terminals.
How to get employees to embrace new technologies
The panelists agreed that just buying the technology won’t make you an overnight success; it all starts with finding a champion for change to engage employees of all levels and ages.
“Technology is only as good as someone who masters it,” said Bennett, a heavy equipment mechanic and operator with more than 25 years of experience. “I’m the old guy here. You’d think I’d be the guy who would be resistant to it. When I started applying it, I turned the tables. I went to the new guy and said, ‘You want to operate this new equipment? You’ve got to learn the technology.’ And lo and behold, he caught on pretty quickly.”
Bennett says other operators also wanted the opportunity to operate the new equipment, causing the adoption of payload weighing technology to spread like wildfire among the employee base of concrete, civil construction and masonry contractors.
Wuori saw a similar phenomenon happen among his asphalt paving crews. After some initial resistance and fear of “big brother” watching their every move, Pavewise operators soon realized the ways in which smart compaction technology could help them improve.
“We found a winning team, and they found success. Soon the next team wanted success, too,” he says. “We were maximizing density incentives on PWL (percentage within limits) projects and being super efficient to the point where we could even pull a roll of carpet because we were so efficient with the others.”
“They’re competitive,” he added. “Every team wants to start competing and be ‘the team,’ the A team.”
“It starts with building relationships,” adds Spates, a quarry performance specialist who uses equipment telematics to help make open-pit quarry operations more efficient. “When we start this program on a site, I spend weeks at a time just sitting in the old trucks, sitting with the loader operator and getting to know them. Once they get to know me, we have a mutual relationship and a mutual agreement to try this thing out.”
Equipment of the worldMeasuring ROI and benefits of technology
Now that technology is fully integrated into contractors’ businesses, they say they can’t live without it. Panelists generally agreed that the primary benefits come down to efficiency, safety and workforce development.
Recruitment and Retention
Stutsman, who handles complex excavation and utility projects in Aspen, Colorado, has equipped his entire fleet with grade control and quick couplers for attachment changes in seconds. He’s also been testing the first excavator bucket in the U.S. equipped with ground-penetrating radar and recently helped develop the first 6-way blade for a track loader. He says all this technology has operators beating down his door for the chance to operate these unique machines. (Stutsman was named Equipment World’s 2023 Contractor of the Year.)
“Now that we’ve implemented all of this, our employee retention has been tremendous,” Stutsman says. “We haven’t really had anyone leave. In fact, we’re now getting more applications than ever because people want to come and operate this equipment.”
While safety was the initial reason for Associated Terminals to implement Cat Command remote operator stations, increased workforce flexibility was an unintended consequence for the cargo solutions company.
“When we hit COVID and the staffing shortages came along, the ability to be dynamic with the workforce, the ability to touch different locations without having to send staff to those individual locations, which could be 150 miles away, became very valuable and it started to scale from there,” Blank Jr. said.
In addition to geographic flexibility, Command technology has also helped the company tap into new workforce pools.
“Traditionally, it’s been a male operator workforce for us. You had to come in as an able-bodied person. What we’ve seen is that we’ve been able to tap into other job markets, so now we have women who want to operate equipment for us. We’ve also had employees in the past and people in the workforce with disabilities. We’re able to bring those people in and give them a job that they wouldn’t be able to do otherwise,” he adds.
Training Support
As new operators enter the business, panelists said technology can be used to improve their skills at a faster pace.
“We can take an individual with minimal operating experience and give them the data and training to be as good as someone who’s been operating for 10 to 15 years,” Wuori says. “I think that’s really helped the company take on a different workforce — the younger generation coming in with a lack of experience — and make them successful very quickly.”
Spates agrees. “I use the data that [Cat] VisionLink Productivity can help us identify training opportunities with our newer operators. It’s hard to find new workers coming in – trained workers – so this is a tool that helps us get those baselines where we need to be. Some sites that use it best have seen about a 25% improvement in production.”
Increased efficiency
More qualified and informed teams, combined with advanced technology, also result in faster project completion.
“We’ve found that being able to integrate technology into our business with grade control has made us much more efficient on our jobsites. We’re able to do a lot more projects in a given year,” says Stutsman.
Bennett adds: “We use [Cat] Payload on highway trucks and what that did for us was reduce our idle time. In a year and a half, we probably reduced idle time by 30%. It allows our foremen to know how many trucks to put on the line so they can be efficient.”
Data-driven decisions
Panelists also highlighted the numerous ways technology has helped them make better, faster decisions.
“When you have preventive maintenance in sight – next week we have these parts we need to take care of at these job sites, so go ahead and order all these parts and have them there – the logistics of maintaining the shop as a whole are avoided,” says Gaines Blackwell of the benefits of using Cat VisionLink telematics.
In addition to reducing downtime, telematics also provided Partners Excavating’s estimators with more historical bid data. If a cost code was expected to run for 500 hours on a job but actually ran for 300 hours, estimators can make adjustments to future bids. “The analytics we get from VisionLink really helps with that continuous feedback loop. [It] allows us to narrow our estimates to know what was actually done on the job site, so we can continue to win bids and continue to grow.”
“I’m managing about 12 paving projects right now, and I can go in and see how operations are going,” Wuori adds. “If we didn’t have this technology, I would have to be there physically or rely on people out there. Now, I have foremen and operations managers asking me to look at the data and give our perspective.”
Identifying and preventing security risks
And ultimately, technology is also helping hundreds of Savage’s transportation, logistics and material handling equipment drivers and operators get home safely.
“We use Cat Detect, specifically the DSS system, in our on-road vehicles. We’re looking at driver fatigue – that’s a big concern, making sure our drivers are aware of what’s around them and avoiding the distractions of everyday life,” says Flynn.
As operators have become more accustomed to the technology, Flynn says they have gained full acceptance of the new safety measures. “We now have drivers and operators who won’t operate the equipment unless the cameras are working, so there’s this cultural shift and appreciation for what it does, what it does help with and avoiding all the distractions.”
Moving the needle
Blank Jr. may have summed up the conversation best, saying, “It’s really about being competitive. Using technology is something that has always been important, but what we’ve really learned over the years is that… you’re miles ahead of your competition.”
“Looking back six years, the way we operate today is completely different. The way we think about work, the way we think about distance, the way we think about just looking at things that are happening, the jobs that are created in the company and the evolution of jobs, to the benefits that have been given from the top down, even to the lowest person on the totem pole in our companies, it has really changed the culture.”
Equipment of the world
