Inconsistent Prices, Soaring Transport Costs And Supply Bottlenecks – Why The Aggregates Market Last Year Was Anything But Uniform Across The United States. By Barry Hudson Pricing sand and aggregates in 2024 feels like solving a puzzle where half the pieces are missing. Despite being one of the most critical inputs in construction – used in everything from roads to…
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AggNexus Kicks Off in Texas
More than 100 senior U.S. aggregates industry figures and a dozen cutting-edge industry software companies and IT consultancies are gathering in Austin, Texas, for AggNexus, The 2024 Digital Innovation Conference. Held in the University of Austin’s Thompson Conference Center, the first-of-its-kind event is being staged by SEMCO Publishing—the parent company of Rock Products, Concrete Products, Cement Products, and North American Mining magazines—in collaboration…
Read MorePricing Strategies (Part Two)
Does Your 2024 Budget Set You Up For Failure? By Barry Hudson and Steve Franklin In the first of this two-part series, which appeared last month, the authors stated the challenge and offered initial advice. In part two, they identify solutions. – Ed. When thinking about the aggregates industry, and how fixated some people are with volume, as opposed to…
Read MorePricing Strategies (Part One)
Does Your 2024 Budget Set You Up For Failure? By Barry Hudson and Steve Franklin In the first of this two-part series, the authors state the challenge and offer initial advice. In part two, they identify solutions. – Ed. For such an operationally focused industry, quarry operators are very poor at planning, specifically sales and operational planning (S&OP). It’s hardly…
Read MorePrice Management
Rock Products interviews Ksenia Yemelyanova of Price Bee About Analytics, The Market, Customers And Price Strategies. By Mark S. Kuhar Price management has become necessary in our industry, especially after the last few years of high inflation. How did you come to specialize in this area and what particular roles have you had that qualify you as an expert in…
Read MoreThe Record-Breaking Aggregates Industry
The publicly traded companies are out with their full-year 2023 financial reports and by all accounts it was a record-breaking year. The list goes on. While vibrant market conditions continue to drive performance for aggregates operations, there is no discounting the impact of the healthy price increases that companies are also reporting. Rock Products’ pricing guru, Barry Hudson of Price…
Read MorePricing: Embrace the New Technology
The Stone Age Didn’t End Because We Ran Out of Stone. By Barry Hudson In this article, Barry Hudson, co-founder of Price Bee, discusses the pitfalls of relying on spreadsheets, like Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets – or even Lotus 123 (can you remember this?) to run a business in our industry, with input from Thomas Bergmans, senior vice president, Logistics…
Read MorePerfecting the Sales Process in Aggregates
Rock Products Interviews Julia Georgi of Price Bee About Process Improvement, Workforce Issues and Pricing Technology. By Mark S. Kuhar Sales process improvement and digitization are fast becoming necessary in our industry, how did you come to specialize in this area and what particular roles have you had that qualify you as an expert in this area?For the past 15…
Read MoreThe Price is Right
One of the key storylines in the aggregates industry over the past 12 months is the price of aggregates. Like almost every other construction material out there, the price of aggregates has gone up in keeping with the same inflationary pressures felt by other industries. This is very apparent in the recently released first-quarter reports of the industry’s publicly traded…
Read MoreThe Aggregates Producer Price Index
Aggregates Prices Rise In The United States By 1.5% In The First Quarter Of 2023. By Barry Hudson This is the fifth in a series of articles on pricing. -Ed. The 1.5% rise in the average price of aggregates in the first quarter of 2023 comes after a higher price rise (4.7% in the fourth quarter of 2022). The price…
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