At the LafargeHolcim cement plant in M’Sila, Algeria, IBITEK deployed its digital truck flow management solution to handle 400 vehicles a day at a 5 million tonne per year site shipping seven days a week. The project covered automated access control, three bulk loading stations and the integration of transactions with the plant’s ERP. The outcome: loading time cut by 30 %, time on site per truck cut by 50 %, and 1,000 bulk loads automated in the first month of operation.
The context
A plant this size is not run from the kiln alone. With 2 kilns, 5 million tonnes a year and shipments running seven days a week, the bottleneck moves to the gate. Four hundred trucks report to the M’Sila entrances every day. At that rate, truck turnaround time stops being one logistics metric among others: it sets the shipping capacity actually available to the plant, and with it the revenue the site is able to book.
The issues identified before the project
Access control relied on manual checks. Unauthorised vehicles were circulating inside the plant boundary, which is a safety exposure as much as a liability problem for the operator. Trucks were spending longer and longer on site, with the queues that inevitably build up outside the gates.
At the loading stage, matching product, order and vehicle was generating errors that were difficult and expensive to correct once the truck had left. The site also had no end to end traceability: reconstructing a vehicle’s full journey, from entry to exit, simply was not possible.
Results
Following commissioning, loading time was cut by 30 % and time on site per truck by 50 %. One thousand bulk loads were automated in the first month of operation. Access control was streamlined and operators built up their skills on the system.
The clearest way to read it is this: same plant, same loading equipment, but a truck that spends half as long on site. The additional shipping capacity was gained without investing in another loading station.
