Due to the nature of their business, primarily quarrying and rock crushing, dust, dirt and other airborne particles have always presented a threat to any electronics running at Vulcan Materials’ plants.  Depending on the size of the plant, Vulcan needs between 1 to 6 rugged industrial computers to manage their automated processes. They had initially purchased Stealth computers, but had consistent issues with hardware failure. The Stealth computers they used had standard platter hard drives and fans that quickly became saturated with soot, dust, and dirt. Some of their hard drives, motherboards, and power supplies failed within the first year after purchase.

 

 

Vulcan Materials has been implementing the IPC-R1 over the course of the last several years. The same Cybernet computers that Vulcan initially purchased for their first plant are still operable today. They were so satisfied with the products that they began replacing all Stealth computers in their plants. Unlike with their previous vendor, in the rare instances there has been a need for service, turnaround time has been a matter of days rather than weeks. Vulcan will continue to systematically upgrade all of their computers to Cybernet models until all of their plants have been automated. End users have had no complaints with the computers’ ability to run the software. Most importantly however, because of no moving parts on each computer and industrial-grade, quality components, Vulcan’s has seen a positive ROI through the extended lifespan of the computers and the savings on maintenance costs.