No strings attached

Excellence in training

Leica Geosystems’ paving application expert, Michalis Karizonis, was asked to train the Operating Asphalt Team at Sefiani Enterprises, concentrating on specific project needs. For an entire week, the team focused on the three important performance pillars: quality, quantity and simplicity.

Training began with an explanation of the individual hardware components followed by mounting procedures and settings for the asphalt paver equipment. In this case, the paver used was a Vögele Super 1800-2, which was adapted with the Mobamatic 1 levelling system. Using Plug & Play, the Leica PaveSmart 3D was quickly and easily connected to the Mobamatic asphalt paver. Almost all concrete slip form machines, asphalt finishers and milling machines from industry-leading paving manufacturers, such as Bomag, Dynapac, ABG and Vögele, are supported and work seamlessly with Leica Geosystems’ 3D Machine Control technology.

“The interchangeability from one paving brand to another helps to utilise customers’ machinery fleet nearly 100 per cent,” said Rainer Bippen, business development manager at Leica Geosystems. “The cost savings are tremendous for construction companies. Practically any paver can be upgraded to run with the Leica PaveSmart 3D. With the software’s high accuracy performance and the improved concrete yield due to its precise grade control, the Leica Geosystems 3D Machine Control solution gives us major savings in a project’s life cycle calculations.”

On the second day, the training had already reached the asphalt performing level, which means the team was ready to pave the asphalt road “stringless.” While paving the first few metres, the surveying experts from Sefiani made quick as-built checks to compare the paving results with the project design. Surveyors measured the overall deviation at 3mm. The requirements of the contract were set at 15mm. The Leica PaveSmart 3D system, however, improved deviation by 12mm, which is enormous in the road construction industry. Setting new quality standards in Morocco had been achieved.

“The daily goal of the project was to pave 8,000m² of asphalt road. With the improvement of 12mm thickness, this resulted in a best case cost savings of around 15,000 Euros per day on the project. Within a very short period of time, the investment was easily covered,” said Tarik Elasri, support manager at Leica Geosystems’ representative Marcotec. In addition, stakeout, surveying and time costs had been saved due to no longer using string lines as part of the project. Staking out with strings would normally cost the project an additional 1,000 Euros per km length. On this 32km project section, Sefiani figured it saved another 32,000 Euros for the customer by replacing the string lines with 3D machine control.

Explore next chapter: Superiority in service

Story: No strings attached
Chapter 1: Introduction
Chapter 2: Excellence in training
Chapter 3: Superiority in service