KYB Conmat - Developing tech-rich competitive products
“These new additions in our product portfolio are in line with our philosophy of ‘listening to customers.’ In fact, we keep developing new products at regular intervals as we have invested heavily in our R&D set-up in the past one decade. The R&D team works closely with our sales and marketing team for customers’ feedback on our product performance as well as on their site complexities and challenges. So, based on the customers’ growing need for higher productivity by using better quality machines that can meet the site challenges, we keep developing new products and upgrading our existing ones,” says Kashyap.
“Keeping in mind the space constraint in metro cities, we have launched a tower batch mix plant of 30, 45 and 60 cubic meter capacity, with a vertical storage silo, an elevator conveyor, and is fully enclosed against dust pollution. It has a footprint of only 6-7 meters, which is one-fourth of conventional plants, and, therefore, very suitable for metro cities. It has very low power consumption as well and can be used for RMC, residential as well as commercial projects,” he adds.
KYB Conmat’s new compact batching plant with sidewall conveyors can achieve a steep angle up to 50 degrees as compared to the 17-18 degree by the conventional conveyors. “It gives a 10% better output as compared to other batching plants. With this new sidewall conveyor, the batching time is reduced to 50 seconds, since the conveyor is very short and runs at a very high speed. The plant gives higher productivity, lower fuel consumption, and enables easy application in constrained spaces, plus, it is a very low maintenance product. The conveyor has a life of 4-5 years, which is the life of the plant itself. Installation is in fact quick too as everything comes preassembled from the factory. You just need to transport it to the site, unload it and start production.”
“Like our other plants, it is also Scada controlled and we have added a new local language feature. Since, we have our in-house software development capability, we have developed it in all the regional languages and even in French for our machines that are exported to France, making it easy to operate and controls,” informs Kashyap.
KYB Conmat’s two new self-loading transit mixers of 4 and 4.5 cubic meter capacity have been redesigned as per customer feedback and manufactured at its Vadodara facility. “Unlike other European designed transit mixers, which generally cater to the usage of high slump concrete, our solutions will be for low slump concrete, making them suitable for irrigation canal construction. Our R&D team has designed these self-loading mixers with a different technology and a new blade design to handle harsh concrete. In fact, we are the first to launch this product for canal application in India. We have observed that most self-loading Made in India transit mixers cannot handle low slump concrete and have a very limited application, whereas our self-loading transit mixers of 4 cubic meter capacity have been especially designed for this purpose and can handle low slump concrete and canal application very well. We are confident that this product will get better acceptability in the canal market, where we already have more than 4000 customers.”
For the concrete road business, the company is offering a small paver with Gam vibrator; it works on the similar concept of slip forming but is very light weight and of modular structure. It is designed especially for patches where slip form machines cannot go, such as bridges, culverts and for small jobs such as city roads where big machines would pose a problem. Plus, it is available at a fraction of the cost of a slipform machine (almost one-tenth the cost). Due to its light weight and compact size, it can be transported easily and gives the same quality of work in highways as the slipform.
KYB Conmat India’s roadmap for the next 3-5 years includes backward integration, adding loaders to its product portfolio, foraying into the earthmoving segment, asphalt and crushers, in order to offer complete solutions in construction equipment. The company will also improve its manufacturing infrastructure and sales network, and going forward, may expand its manufacturing to other parts of the country.
It has made an entry into the earthmoving segment with the launch of wheel loaders of 1.2 cum and 1.6 cum through a marketing collaboration with Elecon. “In due course, we will start manufacturing the wheel loaders at our own facility, which is being expanded to cater to the new product lines. Our wheel loaders will be promoted as a package offering to our customers who are using our other concrete products, and they will also be targeted for quarry owners, M-sand manufacturers, and RMC producers,” says Kashyap.
To ensure higher availability of its equipment and to reduce owning and operating costs, KYB is adopting digitization. Backed by program logic control systems and an in-house developed software, it is incorporating IoT to enhance machine usage and performance, and enable preventive and predictive maintenance, by fully monitoring them. It is also integrating Artificial Intelligence so that, based on the past performance and forecasting, the machines can take corrective action on their own.
“For example, if a batching plant during operation begins to experience some extraordinary current or power consumption, the machine can diagnose the problem and repair itself. We have developed remote controlled diagnostics in almost all our machines to monitor their movement, location, performance, pilferage of materials, operator handling of the machine etc. We can even repair our machines remotely, sitting at our office with this path breaking technology, which means that we do not have to go to customer jobsites in case of any software problem in the control systems or electrical faults,” elaborates Kashyap.
The company is increasing its manpower; and has set up new service centres all over India. It is also opening more spare parts depots so that parts can reach customers without interruption. “Currently, we are No: 2 in the batching plant market, which is seeing a lot of technical advancements and new companies are entering this segment. Other CE companies are also adding batching plants to their product portfolio. But this does not deter us, as in the last 10 years, with our experience and expertise, we will stay ahead of our competitors. At the same time, we welcome healthy competition as there should not be a monopoly in the market, which will simply lead to complacency and not improvement.”
Sharing his views on the Indian economy, which is under a lot of strain, he says, “In my opinion, we have nothing to worry about as India needs infra development. Plus, there are some global downturns that is impacting our economy, and some structural reforms domestically, plus, every industry goes through a cyclic experience. So, even though the situation may not be that good, but things will start improving soon and FY 2020- 2021 should be a better year for the CE industry.”
NBM&CW March 2020
