The outdoor showroom at a Scott City, Mo., concrete landscape product plant presents a range of dry cast and wet cast units — from paving stones and segmental retaining wall block to exposed-aggregate waste receptacles and garden statuary. Completing the inventory are modern versions of precast picnic tables outdoor diners might recall from 1960s and 1970s McDonald's restaurants.

But a stronger symbolic connection to the company known for golden arches becomes apparent when considering the plant's siting and construction time. In little more than a decade, Dallas-based owner Pavestone Co. has built a national concrete landscape products franchise with an efficiency paralleling that of McDonald's Corp. in fast food. As the Scott City schedule attests, Pavestone — through real estate scouting, plant equipment standardization and supplier partnerships — has streamlined development of high output facilities to a six to eight-month window.

“We were in the right place at the right time,” notes General Manager Paul Kelly. “We bought the property and had a building permit within a week.” Ground was broken at the 15-acre, southeast Missouri site in October 2000. By May, the facility was on its way to a single day production high over the summer, as its Masa Record 9001 Machine turned 6,000 pallets (1,400 × 980 mm; 72,000 sq. ft. product equivalent).

Located next to Cape Girardeau, Mo., and a stone's throw to the Mississippi River, Scott City harbors one of four fourth generation Pavestone landscape product plants, joining properties in Hagerstown, Md., Middleboro, Mass., and Winters, Calif., also completed this year. All are equipped with Standley Batch and CTI/Masa material handling, production and packaging components and machinery, and programmed for annual output up to 20 million sq. ft. Like established operations, they are built to provide product in a range of price points spanning retail, commercial and contractor accounts.

All four plants feature additional automation, greater splitting and cubing capability, and improved safety mechanisms indoors and out. At Scott City, clearly marked truck lanes loop around storage areas organized for first in/first out inventory management, while extensive yard lighting fosters safe night-time loading necessitated by big box retailer customers' changing freight schedules.

The fourth generation properties' machinery sports nuts and bolts modifications prompted by quality assurance and productivity benchmarking from 12 existing plants. A walking beam conveyor from the Record machine to elevator, for example, has been tweaked to assure smooth acceleration and deceleration in transfer of pallets bearing scallop border and other product sensitive to wobbling.

Twin cubing lines, on the other hand, have been installed for in line and off line functionality. If, among typical plant scheduling, crews seek to split product with sharper breaks, they can re-introduce cubes with older, better cured units to the off line area. Concurrently, they can maintain in line cubing of product not earmarked for splitting.

Scott City was dedicated this fall. The first Pavestone property outside a major population center, the plant nevertheless could be the company's most strategic for raw materials, sitting one mile from the Lone Star Cape Girardeau cement mill; two miles from the Southeast Missouri Stone quarry; and 10 miles from the Brenda Kay Aggregates sand pit.

The new facility will serve a 200-mile radius encompassing a) parts of Iowa and eastern and central Missouri presently relying on Pavestone's Lee's Summit plant near Kansas City; b) southern Illinois and Indiana and northern Kentucky; and c) the Mississippi Valley region stretching southward into Arkansas and toward Memphis, Tenn.

PAVESTONE

Land and floor space for material storage and transfer are optimized with a 60 deg., Flex-Wall conveyor charging a 1,000-ton aggregate bin. Fine and coarse aggregate are transferred from a weigh belt to a skip hoist which, along with automated color dispensing units and three cement silos (one 160 ton, two 110 ton), feed a Masa 1500/2250 compulsory high speed mixer. An automation package covers all raw material transfer, likewise monitoring and compensating for moisture based on readings from microwave probes in the sand bins and mixer. The pit and platform can readily accommodate twin skip hoist and mixer installations.

Plant designers stress the dry side's multitasking capabilities. Two cubers allow for in line and off line mode. The first is for splitting and has a push off mechanism combined with four-sided centering clamp to push product into the splitter. After splitting, product is sent through a remodeling station to be patterned in the x and y directions. Product is then re-cubed at a pallet magazine-equipped station. Additionally, the line includes an automatic de-stacker that will take previously cubed — but not split — product and introduce it to the splitter. The de-stacker allows for use of the in line splitting as an off line splitting/cubing combination.

A second cubing line uses a four-sided clamp with frequency drive, plus a pallet magazine. Cubed product travels a walking beam conveyor that allows for strapping without or onto a pallet. The conveyor smoothly indexes cubes outdoors, through automatic vertical and horizontal strapper and stretch wrapping stations.

SCOTT CITY

At Scott City and other fourth generation company plants, Pavestone has refined equipment specifications to improve product quality and production flexibility. Chief among changes is a live pallet buffer bridging the wet and dry sides. Its overhead clamp organizes the 1,400 × 980 mm pallets in eight sections of nine, 16-piece stacks. Pavestone officials identified the pallet buffer area — often situated at ground level behind product machine and control room — as a prime area to reduce sheltered-space consumption. The new buffer scheme allows the sides to operate at different speeds, minimizing the effect of disruptions such as color or mold (wet) or product (dry) changes. The ability to hold 1,200 pallets affords extended operation, for instance, when the machine might be running five cycles/minute, but the splitting line is limited to four cycles/minute.

Landscape contractor Earth Designs built Scott City's outdoor showroom, which includes statuary and picnic tables new to Pavestone's national distribution channel. The products headline a precast architectural site furnishings program the company recently unveiled to complement pavers, patio stones and segmental retaining wall units. The furnishings are produced by a Texas subsidiary, White's Concrete, that recently commissioned a CMS Machinery-equipped plant for which CTI Inc. oversaw design and tooling.

Pavestone maintains a small leased fleet at Scott City, although contract carriers handle most shipments. Plant management has realized improved inventory control with the tracking of product through single or multi cubing phases and first-in/first-out pallet trafficking. The latter is effected with fork lift operators routing loads to the back of numbered aisles.