CEMEX is a global building materials company that produces, distributes and sells cement, ready-mix concrete, aggregates and related building materials to customers and communities throughout the Americas, Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia. CEMEX’s U.S. network includes 10 cement plants, more than 54 strategically located distribution terminals, 50 aggregate quarries and nearly 269 ready-mix concrete plants.
We connected with Matt Lewis, CEMEX’s director of aggregate resources, last week to discuss how the company has been utilizing Kespry’s drone-based Aerial Intelligence platform across its many locations in the U.S for the past three years. Matt outlined the importance of the technology when it comes to not only stockpile management, but also project monitoring and topographic mapping among other tasks.
Kespry: What led CEMEX to adopt Kespry technology? What business needs were not being met?
Matt: As a company, we had been looking into drone technology for several years prior to learning about Kespry. We were using third-party providers to gather manned aircraft imagery and conduct on-the-ground laser scans and GPS surveys but hoped for the ability to eventually do all of that more efficiently and autonomously with drones. We were primarily driven by the need for inventory control, as we are required at least once a year to provide an auditable survey of our stockpile measurements, but we were struggling to find a vendor who could produce results that meet the standards of the auditors.
We found that Kespry’s technology could help us not only meet, but exceed those standards, and the all-in-one solution was a no-brainer for us. There were vendors out there that we considered, but we chose Kespry primarily because of the ease of adoption. Kespry ultimately created the easiest ramp-up scenario compared to any of the other solutions we were looking at and made it easy for us to roll out drones across all of our operations. They even helped train our team extensively on flight planning and the use of both the hardware and processing software.
March 2nd 2021 Update
Our conversation with Matt in February of 2021 went amazingly well, and we’re happy to share all the goodies that came from it. You can deep-dive with the on-demand webinar, and you can also read more of Matt’s answers on this CEMEX case study.
If you have any questions, please reach out to Jordan at jmiller@kespry.com for help!
