Pit & Quarry, February 2014
Remote IDEA Luck Stone takes an improbable concept and successfully applies remote control technology to a wheel loader A ggregate producers dont necessarily have to pump millions of dollars into research and development to cultivate a business changing innovation Sometimes getting feedback from the men and women who power the business is a simpler alternative and the more cost effective route to take Travis Chewning the director of innovation at Luck Stone has found this approach to be particularly effective Asking for employee feedback was specifically useful for Luck Stone in the recent development of a remote control wheel loader About eight months before Luck Stone debuted this technology a team within the company was working to develop ways to increase the companys reserves According to Luck Stone it isnt uncommon for the company to leave stone reserves behind in order to keep loader operators safe Considering this factor one employee posed a question that probably sounded silly when it was suggested yet ultimately changed how the company loads material The question was this What if Luck Stone removed the operator from the cab of the loader Regional operations manager John Thompson threw out the idea and then there was a wide range of responses Chewning says Theres the you cant do that Theres the well if you could do that you couldnt feel the hydraulics you couldnt feel the bucket youre going to damage the loader MSHA wouldnt let you do it Quest for answers Luck Stone turned those challenges into questions and it embarked on a search for answers From an innovation standpoint we have a three stage process Chewning says We take things from an opportunity phase which is fairly wide open Once we ID a project we call that our realization phase Ultimately if we take it all the way to implementation we put that into our implementation stage Luck Stone which celebrated its 90th year in business last year leaned on Thompson to find potential vendors The company interviewed a handful of them and it ultimately chose Anchises Equipment a Canadian company as its partner According to Luck Stone Anchises has more than 20 years of experience with remote control technology in mines The Anchises team was quick to develop an approach that integrated technology into one of Luck Stones 988G wheel loaders from Caterpillar Technical advisor Clark Church and Randy Grimes LOADING BY KEVIN YANIK According to Luck Stone President Bob Grauer two operators at its Bull Run Plant in Virginia are trained to run the Caterpillar 988G wheel loader remotely The 988G can also be run traditionally with an operator in the cab 44 PIT QUARRY February 2014 www pitandquarry com
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