Achieving next-level improvements in productivity requires moving away from a reactive mindset to embrace proactive approaches. With offices in Wilmington, Del. and Montreal, startup C60 is helping ready mixed concrete producers make this transition with its flagship Opportunity Platform (C60). The AI-assisted data analytics platform provides a holistic view of company operations as well as the most valuable ways to optimize business performance—suggesting adjustments to reduce expenses and boost profits.
“Although you can’t change the past, most producers are still pulling data, building reports or compiling spreadsheets that look backward at what happened,” says C60 CEO Ramy Sedra. “Our platform is designed to be forward-looking—to pinpoint opportunities you can act on right now to save money before it’s too late. We integrate the data, build the analytics and serve the insights.”
For producers of all sizes, the potential savings found through C60 is an estimated $1 to $5+ per cubic yard of volume. Direct money-saving opportunities include, for example, better pricing calculations, fleet optimization and reduced material leakage. Indirect savings occur through cost avoidance from detecting problems before they materialize, optimizing mixes, increasing consistency in operations, improving the customer experience and reducing time spent building reports.
HOW IT WORKS
The C60 Platform uses real-time data from telematics, batch panels, sales and invoicing software to identify the cost drivers—called “improvement opportunities” in the platform—across a producer’s entire value chain. It then recommends specific improvement “actions” to refine areas such as batching, quality control, delivery and cost of service. The system assigns dollar values to the recommended actions, indicating how much money will be saved if an action is taken. A series of dynamic dashboards makes these dollar-quantified insights quick to find and easy to digest.
Managers can use the platform to assign action items to team members and then track and measure their progress across the business. According to Sedra, this creates a continuous improvement flywheel as management teams learn and benefit from ongoing data-driven insights.
Sedra calls C60 “platform agnostic.” The cloud-based platform can be integrated across industry systems and does not favor one system over another. It includes pre-built connectors to most of the leading RMC systems (i.e., Command Alkon, Marcotte Systems, Sysdyne Technologies, MPAQ Automation) as well as a universal connector that enables users to pull data from any source. The ability to pull data across the different systems brings a 360-degree view of the business.
ENHANCED FEATURES
In January 2024 at the World of Concrete, C60 unveiled significant enhancements that expand upon the platform’s usability and provide more at-a-glance analytics. Key updates include:
Margin by Customer. The key to unlocking consistent profits involves identifying impactful customers that either help or hurt a producer’s bottom line. The Margin by Customer feature computes the margin on material (MoM) and margin on material and delivery (MoMD) for each customer. The system ranks customers based on profitability to help producers harvest more business from top performers and act on opportunities to improve underperforming customers. Recommended improvement actions for customers with lower margins may include jobsite management, adjusted pricing or even avoiding business with a customer.
“While MoM is easy to anticipate, producers sometimes overlook MoMD, which is margin on material minus delivery costs,” says C60 Vice President of Insights and Customer Success Trevor Panas. “Your profitability might end up vastly different than expected due to delivery costs, which can fluctuate by customer, jobsite and project type. You could end up with negative profitability.”
To gain deeper insights into a customer’s MoMD, the platform allows users to drill down into job ticket details to benchmark and compare profitability by jobsite, plant and mix design over any date range. Factors to consider for similar jobs or locations include load size, round-trip time and pour time.
Another scenario aided by the Margin by Customer dashboard is bidding. Users can sort customers by market, and sales staff can estimate costs and price future work based on prior jobs of similar size, scope, location, etc.
Sales Analyzer. The Sales Analyzer helps producers answer ad hoc questions across all their customers that traditional financial reports cannot. This feature enables staff to have a conversation using sales data by filtering across time, plants, customers, projects and market segments. Users can view what is trending for customers in terms of selling prices, material and delivery costs, MoM and other factors, and they can slice and dice the data in different ways to find answers to questions including:
- What’s my selling price for this job?
- How much volume have we delivered to that job?
- How much volume have we delivered to this customer last month?
- What are my delivery costs for this location?
- How is this plant performing (average selling price, MoMD, material cost changes, etc.)?
- Are we making a profit on this job after paying for material and delivery?
Those who need to dig deeper to answer more complex questions can use Sales Analyzer insights in combination with reports from other dashboards. For instance, from Sales Analyzer, you can pull data from Margin by Customer and Customer Cost dashboards to compare delivery surcharges, distance/travel times, time on site, load sizes, etc., to better understand why certain job types or locations have higher delivery costs than others.
Truck Usage. Improving truck utilization is key to reducing logistics costs. The Truck Usage dashboard allows users to evaluate appropriate fleet sizing and quickly spot which trucks may be candidates for disposal, an improvement plan or relocation to a plant that would make better use of the asset. Trucks can be sorted by delivery quantity and by usage percentage, and the data can be filtered by year, month or week.
Many producers have more trucks than they require in a typical day or even a season, explains Panas. The costs of keeping underused trucks can add up when you consider insurance payments, maintenance, annual plate registrations and commercial vehicle inspections.
“Those trucks sit against the fence as either spares or surge capacity trucks. While some trucks are not terribly expensive to have as security blankets, they are a lot more expensive than a typical producer realizes. We provide the data points so they can decide what’s worth keeping or selling to return the capital to the business,” says Panas.
Home Page. C60 introduced several enhancements to the platform’s home page to help producers focus on profits faster. These include showing the impact of recommended actions already taken, how much savings have been realized through those actions and what’s still available to capture. Delegated actions are now clearly displayed near the top of the screen, so team members won’t miss a deadline. Top profit or savings opportunities across the business are presented front and center.
C60 programmers also provide Opportunity Platform users these additional dashboards:
- Customer Cost of Service highlights customers with the highest or lowest cost to service from a logistics perspective. By uncovering the cost drivers, onsite performance and ordering behavior of each customer, producers can take action to reduce delivery costs.
- Customer Delivery Performance identifies which customers and jobsites have the most overlap (two or more trucks onsite with concrete) and which have the most gap (between loads with no concrete onsite). This allows users to optimize jobsite truck allocation, increasing both trucking efficiency and customer satisfaction.
- Demand Spread Index helps producers visualize the impact of spreading daily and weekly workloads and quantifies the benefits of spreading demand and reducing the trucks required. Multiple plants can be overlaid to see the savings opportunities from clustering or centralizing dispatch and using under-utilized assets from one location to support peak delivery times at other locations.
- Truck Activity Comparison provides a holistic view of the performance of each asset in the fleet. The opportunity value is derived from using KPIs related to increasing the amount of concrete delivered with the asset, such as cycle time, average load size, loads per day and truck usage.
- Status Accuracy provides an instant health check on GPS telematics and mapping practices. Users can quickly see which hardware units may need attention, which drivers are remembering to push the “unloading” button (for those without drum rotation sensors) and which jobsites need more attention when mapped by sales and dispatch teams.
- Batching Accuracy enables managers to pinpoint the raw materials and plants that are batching outside tolerances to eliminate material leakage in their operation.
- Design Yield allows users to evaluate mix designs across all plants. It highlights any over- or under-yielded mixes and ranks them by the highest costing potential.
COLLABORATING FOR CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT
User feedback is integral to the platform’s development, guiding continuous improvements to meet evolving industry needs. The C60 team’s collaborative approach gives the platform a competitive edge and drives substantial profitability improvements for producers.
“Whether it is sales, customer margins or trucking, we are constantly working on updates to provide producers the ability to make profit-enhancing decisions in the moment,” says Ramy Sedra. “We are excited about this first round of major updates, which will bring producers even more sales and margin information, instantly.” — C60, 312/404-3438, www.c60.ai