For over a year Shimmick Construction has been retrofitting the Dumbarton Bridge to make safety improvements and increase the its capacity to handle forces caused by earthquakes. The work included the reconstruction of bridge joints to allow for more movement of bridge segments without damage when an earthquake occurs. The joints are composed of heavily reinforced concrete covered by massive steel plates. The construction challenge for Shimmick and Graniterock, the concrete supplier of choice, was to get concrete to entirely fill the cavity under the steel plates through small holes drilled in the top of the steel plates. This meant the concrete needed to be highly fluid and flow freely to make its way around the dense steel reinforcing under the steel plates. The Caltrans specification also required that the mix not segregate into rocky pockets and sandy/cement pockets so that the strength and durability of the concrete was consistent throughout the joint.
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Editor’s Note: This July 2010 issue of  Aggregates Manager highlights the customer service approaches championed by Bruce W. Woolpert, President and CEO of Graniterock from 1987 to 2012.
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Graniterock released the Graniterock Calculator mobile application for the Android platform, providing Android users with a useful construction materials calculator. With the release of our app for the Apple app store back in March of 2011, the Android announcement marks Graniterock’s commitment to its customers’ needs in our expansion to additional mobile platforms.
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You can now calculate right from the job site the correct amount of the high-quality Graniterock Products to do your job. Get your free download of the Graniterock iPhone App Version 1.0 Construction Calculator, now available in a convenient form right from your phone. Check it out!
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The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission recently announced a settlement in an unlawful harassment case the Commission brought against a large operator of Interstate truck stops.  The complaint by the EEOC charged that female cashiers at a Love’s truck stop in Arizona were sexually harassed by customers stopping for fuel.  According to the complaint, the offending truck drivers made crude and suggestive comments to the cashiers, pressed for personal information, and engaged in other unwelcomed conduct.   
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How do businesses manage customer feedback? The feedback could arrive in a letter, a phone call, a face-to-face meeting, or a formal customer satisfaction survey. In most organizations, businesses focus nearly all of organization’s time and energy on what the feedback tells us didn’t go well or areas in which the business fell short of a competitor. Effort is needed to attack these problem areas and correct them. The goal is to be the best at earning a customer’s business every day. The thinking is that if we eliminate any “negatives” then customers will want to continue to do business with us.
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