INDUSTRY LEADERS
BEN LEFROY Wirtgen
THINKING OUTSIDE
THE BOX TO COMBAT COVID-19, FUTURE CHALLENGES Ben Lefroy is the Kleemann National Sales Manager for Wirtgen Australia and New Zealand. He reflects on the ways Wirtgen has navigated the pandemic to continue to provide quality products and services for the quarrying industry, and forecasts the challenges that await both Wirtgen and the industry in general. How has Wirtgen Australia performed during the COVID-19 global pandemic? In the past 20 months, Wirtgen Australia has performed reasonably well, particularly in the crushing and screening space. This is largely due to government stimulus and the stock issue that all manufacturers will be currently experiencing. In general, we can always do better, but it hasn’t negatively impacted the industry as much as initially expected, particularly in quarrying. A common theme among other suppliers for this feature has been the constraints on supply of stock, and the container shortage. Have you been able to prepare for it in advance? We made some strategic decisions in March 2020, as things were getting risky, to ramp up our stock. It was a good strategy because we were able to keep a lot of existing and new customers crushing and screening when they weren’t able to purchase their loyal brand. If they urgently need gear for a crushing contract and you have it then that can be a turning point to assist in getting a project up and running. From a parts point of view, we’ve had to increase our inventory levels to counteract excessive lead times from our suppliers. We are working closely with our customers to support them as required. Has the pandemic dramatically changed the way Wirtgen Australia conducts business with the Australian quarrying industry? Did the lockdowns, border closures and restrictions on travel impact on the delivery or servicing of machines? Did it mean you were doing more virtual communication? Absolutely. In the bigger markets on the eastern seaboard, a lot of interaction with our customers has been via email, phone, or videolink of some description, eg Zoom,
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Quarry January 2022
Teams. We haven’t been able to do site visits, we haven’t been able to take new customers to view machines, we had to get creative to allow people to look at machines. One of our challenges has been in after sales. Because there were border closures, we had to ramp up our service teams in certain states, with a key focus on crushing and screening. From an after sales perspective, a lot of our technical support is done by telephone or email. It’s been a challenge but we’ve done about as good a job as anyone could have in that space and we’ve explored other means of assistance and interaction. For instance, service teams going into remote areas are introducing customers to service glasses to allow us to see what the customer is looking at. We can talk our customers through an inspection, we can ask them to open an electrical cabinet, we can talk through what the components are and how they work, and you can basically put up a schematic on the glasses while you’re looking at the screen. It’s another way of interactive training without being physically present. What are the most popular mobile crushing and screening products in the quarrying industry today? What are the most popular Kleemann products? Some of the most popular mobile crusher and screen plants are scalping screens, horizontal screens, jaws and cones. It really depends on the industry. We cover quarrying, mining and recycling, as all our competitors do. Every brand would be foolish to think they have a one-stop shop and the best in every product line but the scalping screens from some of our competitors are good products. We are now looking to combat that with our new MSS 802 EVO scalping screen. this machine is made in house at Kleemann and can offer the same quality and
reliability of our other products lines. From our side, the MR 130 EVO2 impact crusher and the MC 110 EVO jaw are very popular products. We’re looking forward to the release of the new MC110 EVO2 into the market. We’ve had the first units arrive in Australia – and the first one went out the door for a valued customer in December. This machine has industry-leading features to assist both owner and operator run the equipment with ease. Both the MCO 90 EVO2 cone crusher and the MC110 EVO2 are second generation machines of previous models, and fitted with an updated version of SPECTIVE, Kleemann’s digital operating concept, so it’s a highly interactive, intuitive system, which makes for ease of operation and simple learning for operators. SPECTIVE Connect is a telematics system on the MCO 90 and the MC 110 that allows you to extract live, real time information off the machine, to understand the status of the machine. We’ve obviously refined the pre-screens on the jaw. We’ve managed to maintain the transport constraints and keep it very close to the older models. The set-up on the MC 110 is all managed via remote control, that’s with hopper extensions, with hydraulic folding and locking from the ground. The pre-screen has been enhanced on the jaw, meaning better throughput and screening efficiency. The jaw liners and cone liners have remained the same between the old models and the new. There have been changes to the crushers but they have maintained the liners, which is nice for a customer that is renewing its fleet and they have old stock on the ground. They can reuse their current stock of manganese when changing liners. An option for customers is a new active overload system on the jaw for non-crushables. It’s a fast opening jaw. As opposed to destroying toggle plates, the system senses
