In 2014 Milbank embarked on a study of how to modernise and improve their processes to make the manufacture and distribution of the concrete as efficiently as possible and minimize the down time experienced with the old plant. This consequently led to a significant investment throughout the entire factory including mould redesign and replacement and, after many months of deliberation it was decided to start this process by means of the concrete plant, namely the concrete distribution system.

The challenge on the project development was even harder since the production demand at Milbank couldn’t allow even a minimal shutdown of the factory for the retrofit. Here MCT came up with a very flexible solution which involved it’s designed and built smart mobile plant type MCR ‘on the road’ to ensure the concrete production was manufactured/batched outside the factory and then moved by conveyor belt into the existing distribution line over the 8 week period required for the retrofit of the plant and distribution system to be completed.
This allowed Milbank to fulfil their production programme and to avoid purchasing concrete from external sources, where no doubt some control would be lost and be able to create some great savings in the process.
A massive advantage of the MCR was that the proposed mixer operators were trained on the operation of the MCT ‘Compumat’ automation software and this was a great advantage as all the MCT plants operate on the same structure and this saved an enormous amount of time, once the commissioning of the main plant got underway.
As the main focus from training the new operators wasn’t as crucial anymore as they already had been operating the Mobile plants software then more focus could be spent fine-tuning the mixes.