Features, Mobile Plant, Plant & Equipment

At the heart of regional quarrying

Regional Group trusts Terex Jaques to uphold its legacy as one of the largest construction material companies operating across Qld and NSW.

Regional Group is one of the largest construction materials companies operating across Central Queensland and New South Wales. To uphold this legacy, it trusts Terex Jaques.

Regional Group has made a name for itself up and down the east of Australia, with a fleet of Terex crushers and screens on more than 20 sites from Blackwater to West Wyalong.

The equipment packs a punch as Regional Group supplies materials to key infrastructure projects like the inland rail, where only the highest quality product will do.

The Terex Cedarapids MVP380X and the MVP450X cone crushers are popular selections for Regional Group, mounted on trailers for prime movers to deploy wherever the next job may be.

Regional group business development manager of NSW, Richard Tomkins, said he wasn’t aware of a better choice for his company’s mobile applications.

“For their footprint size, they’re as good as any cone crusher on the market, pound for pound,” Tomkins told Quarry.

“We’ve got equipment in fixed plant environments as well as mobile environments. It just means that you can bring a high- capacity plant to large scale projects, which otherwise wouldn’t be possible.”

Another competitive advantage of Regional Group is its culture of cross-training employees to make them as versatile as possible.

This involves training people from scratch on a range of equipment, quarry processes, and maintenance procedures.

This business model becomes highly beneficial when the labour market tightens, as it has over the past few years.

“The benefit of cross-training our staff is we get better utilisation out of everyone. We give them a more wholesome opportunity where they can enjoy variety,” Tomkins said.

“By training more people on the various equipment, no matter what site they operate in, they can be familiar with the machines they end up on.”

But successfully cross-training Regional Group employees is made much easier through the use of Terex equipment.

“We have purchased a lot of Cedarapids equipment, both screens and crushing plants, which gives us quick changeover times. This is because we’ve minimised our critical spares inventory through standardising our equipment,” Tomkins said.

“Every quarry process is different in terms of the material type or how it is extracted or processed. So by having crushing plants that are very similar in nature, it improves our quality because people know how to operate the plants very effectively.”

Even before installation, Terex works with Regional Group to understand the application and select the right machine the first time around, conducting various on-site consultations and working through aggflows.

Following installation, Terex equipment has been designed to last with minimal maintenance and low downtime.

Tomkins said this improved safety standards for Regional Group, while ensuring productivity is maximised.

“Their robust and reliable nature certainly minimises our downtime, which in turn minimises our people’s interaction with  the machines for any reactive maintenance,” he said.

“Obviously you’re more likely to have an injury in a reactive maintenance situation than during scheduled maintenance. The less things break down, the more you keep your operators out of the line of fire and the more production is possible.”

As for supporting Regional Group and its employees through the installation and operation of its machines, Terex maintains a robust relationship.

Even with such a large customer like Regional Group working in quite remote locations, Terex sets aside the time to take operators through the paces.

“Terex Jaques have been great at providing support when they supply the equipment, in terms of training and training manuals,” Tomkins said.

“Even though we’ve ordered a number of similar machines from them over the years, they’ll come out to help with commissioning the various equipment like it’s the first time.”

Visit terex.com to find out more.

This feature appeared in the May issue of Quarry.

 

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