46. 2025 Rejected Load Review

Andrea and Griff discuss our 2025 rejected load performance as well as new visibility into end-of-day washout performance. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:08

Welcome to Loaded, the Hahn Ready Mix Podcast with Andrea Meyer, Griffin Hahn, and producer Lex.

SPEAKER_01 0:14

How's it going?

SPEAKER_00 0:15

Happy New Year.

SPEAKER_01 0:16

Welcome back.

SPEAKER_00 0:17

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 0:18

How was your vacation?

SPEAKER_00 0:20

Uh okay. It was a little chillier than expected in Florida. And uh it was just a lot of together time with extended family.

SPEAKER_01 0:33

So it was That's what the holidays are all about. Together time. That's why everybody, it's everybody's favorite time of the year.

SPEAKER_00 0:40

Exactly that. It was a nice break. I appreciated getting away from you know how like right when Christmas is over and you have all this stuff to put away and clean up. And I didn't do that because we left on Christmas Day. So it was nice to have a little break from that.

SPEAKER_01 0:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 0:55

But then it came right back to us.

SPEAKER_01 0:56

Yeah, but you had to come home and then clean up your house.

SPEAKER_00 0:58

Yes, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 0:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:00

But that's that's good for me. This is my favorite uh at home and at work. This is the time where my brain works the most and I have the most energy to change everything.

SPEAKER_01 1:10

You are you jump in beginning of January. Lots of ideas and projects. Yes.

SPEAKER_00 1:16

My husband actually said this week that he's glad he doesn't have to deal with me very much during daytime hours. I burn out all of my energy by the time I get home. So lucky for him.

SPEAKER_01 1:27

Great, great. All right. Well, what uh what announcements do we have today?

SPEAKER_00 1:32

I have a couple of things. Uh I think I've talked about both of these already, but it is now 2026. So things change. Your personal health insurance that rolls over on the first of the year. I know it's kind of tricky for us because our payments change in March, but the actual plan year is January. So when you go to pick up your prescriptions or when you go to a doctor's appointment, you will have a deductible again now. So I just like to remind everyone of that. I know it's kind of a shock when you, you know, last month you may have picked up that prescription and it was free or$5. And now this month it might be$100. So just want to remind everyone that that does reset in January. And along those same lines, our insurance here at work for our trucks and equipment changes. So we have new insurance cards that hopefully have been placed in all the trucks. But I just want everybody to take a look and make sure that those 2026 registrations and insurance cards are in every single truck.

SPEAKER_01 2:27

Yeah. And make sure it says 2026 on it.

SPEAKER_00 2:29

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 2:29

Yeah. Great. What else you got?

SPEAKER_00 2:32

You didn't bring anything?

SPEAKER_01 2:33

I did, but I know that we have the same one. So I was going to let you lead on it. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:37

Okay. Um we, you know, being slower this winter, we are keeping a more careful watch on hours, total hours and how efficient we are with that time. So with that, we look at startup time, which is how long it takes from the time someone clocks in until they're ready to take a load or until we load them.

SPEAKER_01 2:57

Until we load them, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 2:58

So that's tricky on both sides, right? That's kind of a management thing, a dispatch thing, a customer thing, where we, you know, do we know that they're ready to go to load them and how we plan on bringing people in?

SPEAKER_01 3:10

That number is hard to control because of the customers, you know, all it all it takes is your earliest customer saying, ah, I need to push back an hour. And then a lot of times by the time we know that someone's already on the clock. And so it it's difficult for us to control that startup time number.

SPEAKER_00 3:27

Yeah. And every day we're doing our best to kind of anticipate that, you know, how how likely we are to go when we think we're going to go. Yeah. And I know that's frustrating on the driver's part too, when you, you know, have to wake up early and rush and get here on time and then you don't go and you sit in your truck for 30 minutes. I know that's frustrating. So we are always trying to make that better. Um, same thing with the end of the day. It's another one that's tricky because we want people to take the time to get their trucks cleaned up and do their post trips and fuel up and do everything that you're supposed to do. But we don't want to be excessive with the amount of time that we're on the clock after we're done being loaded for the day.

SPEAKER_01 4:05

And this has been our visibility has been bad on this topic in the in the past. So because of our, you know, digital fleet, where we uh the communication with the drivers and then command alcon, they didn't talk together well. So when we would put a wash out on a truck and command alcon, it would just disappear right away. So we couldn't, it was hard for dispatch to alert that, hey, we still have someone on the clock well after they probably should be off the clock unless they were washing on their truck. Command Alcon acquired Digital Fleet late last year, and now that visibility has significantly improved.

SPEAKER_00 4:40

Yep. Systems are working better together than they ever had.

SPEAKER_01 4:43

Correct. Correct. So I'm really excited because I think it's a place where it's been we've been weak in our management, right? As far as making sure that people are being productive after we're done hauling concrete. And so yeah, to underline what you said, we're not trying to say you can't clean on your truck or you if there's other tasks to do that you can't do those. That's all fine and great. We just want to make sure there's good communication. Um, so dispatch knows what's happening. And then we're managing the time when people aren't doing that. Because frankly, we are well aware that there's a lot of people that get a washout and aren't getting off the clock in a timely manner. And it's been difficult for us without parking someone at every one of our locations to make sure that they're getting off in time. Um it it it's been challenging for us to try to get a handle on that, but now we have the ability. So I guess I guess it's a warning for for people that uh maybe have abused getting off the clock at the end of the day. Um, that we will we have the ability to watch closer and we are going to be watching closer. We're going to be managing that's a a key thing we're going to be managing this year. And again, if you need time to wash on your truck, it's just about communicating that with dispatch and and they'll give you the time you need uh with dispatch.

SPEAKER_00 6:07

Yeah, I think I think what we're asking for is efficiency and communication. Uh it's definitely not like a gotcha thing where we're trying to babysit people and bust them if they're a minute over or whatever. Yeah, yeah. It's it's just about how long does it take to do what we actually need to do? And are we communicating when there's an exception that goes beyond that?

SPEAKER_01 6:24

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 6:25

I think it's pretty simple. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 6:26

So it's kind of similar to uh you would you would uh ask the question last year of people if we had extra water added. Yeah. And you reach out and say, hey, what happened on this job? Why did we have to add so much water? Kind of foresee this similar situation where if you get a washout time and it's 50 minutes before you get off the clock, that probably gonna have a conversation about why it took that long. Um and there may be good reasons why, and there may be not, but we'll we'll have the conversation. So just be everyone be prepared for Andrea to bug you or Sheldon or Sean or Zach or who whomever, right? Yes. Um, but that that is something that we are definitely trying to proactively work on this year.

SPEAKER_00 7:11

Great. What's the good news? What are we gonna talk about today?

SPEAKER_01 7:14

That's I do have good news today. So we we talked about doing a kind of a number of episodes reviewing some different things from 2025. And I'm sure everyone well remembers podcast episode seven, where we talked about uh minimizing rejected loads.

SPEAKER_00 7:32

And so I thought episode seven. Wow, that was a long time ago.

SPEAKER_01 7:35

I did I did go back and re-listen, and of course you did. I would say it was very interesting to hear how we talked now on the podcast and how we talked then. It was so much more almost scripted than maybe we were prepared. We sounded kind of stiff. And the funny thing was you you did your intro and I heard it this time, and I went, oh geez, that doesn't sound near as good as it does now. And then and then I immediately on the air complimented you about how that was the best one yet. I don't want to go left to listen to the first five because that must have been terrible. Uh so yeah, it's kind of funny to I haven't I haven't gone back to listen to any of the early ones since we started this. But anyway, uh in that episode, we talked a lot about rejected loads, what they mean, um, and kind of a lot of our 2024 performance. So I thought it'd be good to do an update because I'm I'm very pleased on how we did on rejected loads in 2025. So I have all the stats handy and um uh yeah, I'm I'm excited to share our performance there.

SPEAKER_00 8:38

So just in case someone hasn't gone back and listened or they missed episode seven, they're new listeners to the podcast.

SPEAKER_01 8:45

Why don't you start by just talk, like reminding everybody what we consider rejected loads, what it is, why we So a rejected load is concrete that we have produced that we intend to sell, and for whatever reason we can't sell. So it's not, you know, donations or um concrete used in the in the yard or something like that. It is purely when a truck breaks down, a plant breaks down, or it's rejected on site because it's out of spec for slump or air or temperature, um, or it's too old. You know, those are the kind of things that a load would be rejected for, and then we track all of that. And that's important not only because there's a cost associated with losing the loads, because there there is. The most important thing is I think it's a great metric for kind of the customer service performance that we're doing. If our customers are routinely waiting on us as concrete has not met their standard, has not showed up when they expected, that's a really bad sign. So tracking that and minimizing those things as much as possible is really important. And some of it's, you know, equipment will break down. A plant will break down, a truck will break down. Those are just part of it in the industry. So, you know, making a target of zero is not realistic and it's never going to happen. So we we are just the things that we can control and and those equipment failures are, you know, there's things we can do to minimize them, but we can't eliminate and similarly with quality related things, we're probably never going to get to zero, but there we can do a lot to to bring that down. And I think we have done a lot.

SPEAKER_00 10:33

So um Yeah, I think it's it's sometimes hard to keep a scoreboard of when things go right because you don't notice it when it goes right. So I kind of like this idea of tracking the rejected loads is uh kind of a tracking of errors, and some of those are more preventable than others. And I think that's why we categorize them, but it's hard to know when you're winning the game, and this is kind of one of those things where we we know we're heading in the right direction.

SPEAKER_01 11:02

Yeah. So I think we're going on about 10 years now that we've set a target that we wanted to beat, and we have for the first time met that target. That target was 0.4% of our loads rejected. So not 4%, 0.4%. So for every thousand yards we batch, uh, we want to have less than four yards that we reject, is is the the goal.

SPEAKER_00 11:31

So is that your goal or is that like an industry-based goal, or how'd you come up with that?

SPEAKER_01 11:37

Um I I came up with that number. I think it is, I think the I haven't seen it for a few years. At one point, the NRMCA benchmark was something like 0.5% was average around the country. And I think in northern climates where air content is part of the equation, it's it's a lot more challenging for us than it would be, you know, if you're batching in Florida and you don't ever have to worry about air. That's one whole reason that a truck might be rejected. That's, you know, not part of. They also don't have to worry about trucks freezing up and things. So there's when you look at a national picture, I think we have a lot of factors working against us that maybe places don't otherwise in other areas might not have. So anyway, but I I think we are should be and are better than the average, right? So the 0.4 was a pretty solid number that I thought was achievable based on our past data. And we we just have never gotten there. Last year we were 0.45. Uh, the year before, 0.432, the year before 0.506. In 2018, we were as high as 0.781. Now that was during the I-74 bridge. So a lot of that was related to to the difficulties of the sort of have like a physical reaction to that number in that year.

SPEAKER_00 12:58

Like I I shudder to think of it.

SPEAKER_01 13:00

It was all uh drilled shafts out in the river that uh we would lose three percent air through uh a pump, and that was a little bit more.

SPEAKER_00 13:08

And there were already four trucks loaded with that exact same thing that we're probably.

SPEAKER_01 13:12

Yeah, it somehow that was all our fault, even though we couldn't control the pumps. So anyway, so we we have this goal set for 0.4%. And last year we did 0.347, which is really excellent. So the difference between 0.45 and 0.347, so our 2024 performance and our 2025 performance uh saved us about$40,000. And if you look at it versus uh that terrible year in 20 in 2018, if we did the same volume, it would save us$170,000. So that's a big deal, um saving the those costs. But even more importantly, like I said before, it's the amount of incidents that we've had were are less, and so that the impact to our customers are less.

SPEAKER_00 14:03

Yeah, yeah. The material costs are nothing compared to the code. Yeah, and that's not material.

SPEAKER_01 14:07

That's that includes labor and all those things in in the in that cost calculation. But it is uh it it yeah, it's it's way more important for the relationship and and the potential for you know rectification costs can be huge compared to just rejected, you know. So if if you pour concrete that's not, you know, if there's a cold joint or something, we have to rip out more concrete, you know, it could cost us way, way more than that. So yeah, I'm very pleased with that. Um that's awesome. 0.347 number.

SPEAKER_00 14:40

What are the levers that made the difference?

SPEAKER_01 14:43

Yeah. So when we categorize these, we look at every plant and the performance at each plant. And that's not always controllable by the plant, but it's just good to see if there's an area where we're doing great or not doing great, and then by a number of categorizations. So the major categories that we track air content, batch error, contamination. That's like if we put uh sand in the rock bin at the plant, and a lot of times it's a loader operator issue or potentially a product issue. Um dispatch error, driver error, other plant breakdown, slump time, truck breakdown, and temperature are the main ones that we normally normally see. So we had some uh, you know, a number of those we don't have much every year, and it's similar. They're relatively flat. But I'll hit some of the highlights. The major, major improvement was last year we lost 230 yards due to batch error. And this year that number was down to 76 and a quarter yards. So we um yeah, we we basically in one third, one third the batch error rejected loads. So that is wonderful improvement. And yes, it's probably true. You know, we were slower this year, so there's more time and less um less urgency, I guess, on the batchers, but that kind of improvement comes from just paying closer attention and doing things right. And so um very, very proud of that. Uh so that was a positive dispatch error last year had 99 yards rejected, and this year 48 in three quarters. So we've cut that in half as well. The same thing, just attention to detail and consistency, you know. Um, so that was that was wonderful. Uh plant breakdown yards also nearly cut in half, 224 last year at 113 this year. And so that's you know, I think speaks a lot to the the plant maintenance team and and the effort they put in for preventative maintenance and trying to be proactive and finding things before they go wrong. Um, so that was great. Um slump was down slightly from 119 yards to 101. Uh so there are a small improvement there. And then we had uh a big improvement. Last year we had 91 yards of contamination. I think most of that came from one incident, and this year there was just six. So um, yeah, so it's basically about avoiding a big issue. Um so yeah, so that was good. Some of the other ones that tracked slightly up our air content uh lost yards last year was 54. This year 64. So we basically lost one more load to air content related. And most of those I know came from a situation where we were batching an interior mix with no air in the mix. And this is the one. We talked about it last time, and um, yeah, we threw like three or four trucks away because there was the air was too high, just in trapped air, and um they would have been totally fine to use. So um that's a bummer that that's not that I think that number also would have been significantly better without that incident. Um truck breakdowns climbed slightly from 228 yards to 250 yards, so a little bit more. That was a lot of it related to beginning of the year. We had issues with fuel injectors and water pumps, um, where a lot of our newer trucks were breaking down pretty regularly. And I think that really improved as the year went on.

SPEAKER_00 18:31

Yeah, it seems like we've worked through a knock on one, but it does seem like we've worked through that particular issue.

SPEAKER_01 18:37

Yep. And then we did have an increase in our driver error rejected loads. Um, so this kind of it's a pretty broad topic, but if it's you know, a driver took a wrong term and got lost, the water valve left on, um, you know, ran into something, something like that. Yeah. Um, so that was 187 yards last year, and it was 227 yards this year. So um a little bit of an increase on that one. But that's really uh, you know, most of the categories we did significantly better. And then when I look at plants, we had some other uh some of the plants that had we'll just do the ones that had big reductions. So our muscatine plant last year, we had 226 yards rejected. And this is one where they they actually had an increase in yards, uh, which is not the case in most of our uh locations. And they only had 63 this year. Nice. So major reduction of of issues in muscatine. So nice, nice job to that group, as well as the two Davenport plants. Uh plant 13 had 315 yards rejected last year and 227 this year. Um plant 32 had 332 last year and 225 this year. And Geneseo also cut theirs in half. Um 77 yards last year and 29, or sorry, 30, 35 this year. So uh improvement on all those ones, and and so that's that's wonderful. That's wonderful.

SPEAKER_00 20:10

Yeah, that that's another thing that I love about this particular metric, the score that we keep is everyone in the company in one way or another can follow a line to show how they impacted it.

SPEAKER_01 20:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 20:24

One way or the other. Right. I think that's really cool.

SPEAKER_01 20:26

Yeah. So yeah, so I I'm I'm very pleased with our efforts and and I think that it's something we can build upon, right? So we have we're about now is not the time to let off. No, not you know, 0.347 is is the best we've ever done since we've tracked this. Um, but you know, uh there's some benchmarking I've seen from other producers that have been better than that. Yeah. And so there's opportunity. So I think we're about continuous improvement around here. And so I'd like to set a new goal for us as a company. And I think it's very achievable. And it's just one step at a time. So I think, I think point three is going to be our target to get under for 2026. So I think it's very doable. Some of these situations that, you know, the one-off situations we talked about that happened this year, if those just few incidents don't happen, uh, we'd be there. So it's a doable goal. It's just going to require everyone to stay focused and the the attention to detail and um making sure that we follow our processes properly is what helped us get where we are and and is going to help keep driving us forward.

SPEAKER_00 21:42

Yeah, I think it's kind of like improving your pace on something, or you know, once you see that you can improve this much, can you improve this much more? I think I think we definitely can. I think a big part of it is not letting the things that you can't control distract you from trying to. Control the things that you can. Like I think it's easy to be like, oh, we're never going to be able to do anything about this particular thing. So we just won't try. Right. And we can see here this year that focusing on it, continuing to focus on it and talk about it really does make an improvement.

SPEAKER_01 22:14

Yeah. Absolutely. Do we have anything else we want to talk about today?

SPEAKER_00 22:18

Did you bring like champagne or donuts? Or like usually when there's a celebration, there's like a treat.

SPEAKER_01 22:24

I thought about that. Uh that, you know, it's a 10-year goal that we haven't been able to hit and and we finally hit it, that it should do something.

SPEAKER_00 22:31

It's the second time you've said 10 years, it's really coincidental that it's my 10-year anniversary this week also. So maybe I don't know if it's causation or correlation, but either way, it's it's interesting.

SPEAKER_01 22:44

It took you 10 years to make an impact. Is that what you're trying to say?

SPEAKER_00 22:48

We've been working on it since the day I got here.

SPEAKER_01 22:52

I would in general, our uh, like if you look at the graph, um you can't see it, but I'm holding it up. Uh in general, the trend line is definitely significant reduction most years. We we have made good progress and and let's keep it up.

SPEAKER_00 23:06

Absolutely. We totally appreciate everybody that contributed to this success. And like I said, I really everyone does contribute to this, and we really appreciate everyone.

SPEAKER_01 23:16

Yeah, yeah, for sure.

SPEAKER_00 23:18

Uh we also would appreciate if people would send us loaded questions.

SPEAKER_01 23:22

That would be good. It feels like a like a good podcast producer would like you know go proactively go out and get those loaded questions and and have them ready for us to yeah, okay.

SPEAKER_00 23:39

Goals goals for producerlex. All right. Thanks for listening, everyone. Remember to share this podcast with your friends. You can send us loaded questions through the podcast link or send them through email or write them down and leave them on my desk or get a hold of producer lex.

SPEAKER_01 23:55

Yeah, thanks everybody.