BCMI Corp. joined industry experts in presenting combined technology solutions as a path to sustainable practices at Giatec’s Net Zero Construction Conference March 19-20. BCMI was a silver sponsor and exhibitor, showcasing its cloud-based dispatch at the fifth annual event. The Net Zero Construction Conference is a virtual hub for industry leaders in sustainable construction to discuss the advanced technologies, challenges and progress toward reducing the construction industry’s carbon footprint.
BCMI Vice President of Product Adam Gardner and Vice President of Business Development and Outreach Shelby Mitchell participated in a panel discussion, “The No Unmetered Water Initiative – How Interoperability Reduces Waste,” along with Giatec, Digital Fleet and BARD Materials. In this panel discussion, industry experts highlighted how BARD Materials is combining Giatec’s SmartMix predictive optimization, Digital Fleet’s real-time truck and concrete monitoring, and BCMI’s Cloud-based Dispatch and ticketing platform to manage every step of the delivery cycle with sustainability in mind. These integrated solutions will help prevent unmetered water additions, optimize cement usage, and reduce variability in mix performance, allowing BARD to reduce carbon emissions, limit material waste, and produce higher durability concrete with fewer resources.
“The No Unmetered Water initiative really was born out of the need for greater precision and consistency in ready mixed concrete production,” says BARD Materials Technical Services Director Eric Glendenning. “Water is well known to be one of the most critical variables in concrete, influencing workability, set times, strength development, and overall durability. Yet historically, water additions, whether at the plant or in transit or on the job site, have gone unrecorded or at best recorded without precision on the job.”
The initiative focuses on several key areas. The first is precision water tracking with the use of Digital Fleet’s water ad sensors to capture every single gallon of water that is being added to the batch. The second is data centralization and analytics using BCMI’s cloud-based dispatch system to ensure real-time tracking of every load, along with electronic ticket records that include live delivery statuses. The third is performance driven optimization utilizing Giatec SmartMix software, which relies on timely and accurate data from trucks and dispatch. The collective information feeds into Giatec’s AI-powered solution, which allows continuous improvement in mix designs.
“In general, the result will be a fully digitized interoperable system where water usage is no longer an uncontrolled variable, but a significant piece of data that we need to utilize in mix optimization and other business practices,” Glendenning says.
BCMI serves as the hub between each of the other systems, Gardner says. “The BCMI platform has everything from a mobile app to a web-based app and it supports almost every part of a producer’s process,” Gardner says. “We’re pulling information in from various technology providers that really know what they’re doing. Being the platform that manages all that information and lifts it to the right person is the end goal. Producers like BARD are getting to the point that, almost in real time, we can alert people and be proactive rather than reactive.”
This was BCMI’s first full foray into the metaverse. Thanks to Giatec for hosting this educational event!