Chief Executive Officer Martin Willoughby opened the Command Alkon 2024 Elevate Conference earlier this month paralleling today’s information technology environment to the one of 1999, when he and colleagues tested their San Francisco startup’s novel idea in a business downstream of concrete, aggregate or asphalt production and delivery: Online residential real estate listings with photos.
Twenty-five years on, he assured 500-plus customers and partners assembled in Austin, Texas, that “the heavy building materials industry is on the cusp of a major transformation.”
He cited three big developments or inevitabilities signaling the shift, starting with:
- Rapid acceleration of technology, driven by exponential computing power and connectivity growth, plus the convergence of automation and artificial intelligence.
- The potential for technology application and productivity gains spells profound impact for heavy building materials producers.
- Adaptation is key to success for them and their customers.
The productivity promises of plant automation and AI will help concrete, aggregate and asphalt producers contend with a human capital challenge that he and colleagues stressed throughout Elevate presentations: About 40% of the present North American heavy building materials workforce will retire over the next 15 years, becoming a serious talent drain.
Joining Willoughby in the “Creating tomorrow, today” keynote, Chief Product Officer Ranjeev Teelock walked through users’ 2024-2025 migration to Command Cloud from heritage applications supported by on-premises hardware. “The Cloud environment is opening up new possibilities to store and leverage material, production, delivery and customer data in ways suiting individual concrete, aggregate and asphalt producers,” he assured Elevate attendees.
Beyond shedding their Command Alkon program servers, he added, Command Cloud adopters – representing upwards of 100 ready mixed concrete plants thus far – are experiencing new programs modeled on prior Batch, Dispatch and TrackIt platforms. By mid-2025, initial and new adopters will see Command Cloud offer such tools as Payments, Marketplace, Sales & Quoting, Accounts Receivables, and Bulk Material.
The 2024 Elevate Conference included a preview of two Command Cloud Batch offerings, MIntelligent and Sustainability, also set for broad release early next year. An artificial intelligence-powered tool greatly increasing concrete batch plant material feed accuracy, MIntelligent accompanied the acquisition of Marcotte Systems, Quebec, earlier this year.
Initial installations have included independent and major producer plants, primarily in Canada. Like the Marcotte AI technology, the Sustainability tool will exploit spontaneous data retrieval capacity attributable to Command Cloud architecture. Well timed with Buy Clean initiatives, it expedites preparation of individual plant mix design environmental product declarations (EPD) through automated delivery of life cycle assessments underlying calculation of key EPD metrics.
Conference participants were also updated on their host’s rapid embrace or realization of principals behind Lean, Six Sigma and Operational Excellence, primarily through internal training and benchmarking measures. This year’s gathering marked a fifth for Elevate, which succeeded the Command Alkon Customer Conference starting in 2017.
Command Alkon, www.commandalkon.com