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To: Dee Jay who wrote (2609)10/13/1999 2:05:00 PM
From: Dee Jay  Respond to of 2696
 
Stockett's Innovative Plan (from USCement's site):

1.Initial Start Up Strategy. U.S. Cement is in the process of having 15,000 usable bulk cement bags. By mid summer, U.S. Cement will ship its first 30,000 tons of bulk cement in these reusable bags from Indonesia to Las Vegas. U.S. Cement is in the process of having a modern rail unloading facility constructed in Las Vegas to handle the bulk cement bags. The facility will be the only facility in Las Vegas capable of unloading 100 unit train cars at an unloading
capacity of approximately 5 times faster and with less labor than all of its competitors. The facility will be used to demonstrate and document cost and revenue potential, savings potential to the customers, and ability to manage the entire process of importing cement in bulk bags, transporting to a remote city, and selling to existing ready mixed concrete companies.
Subsequent rail unloading terminals will probably be built at customer sites using the lessons learned at the company facility to fine-tune the franchise prototype.

COMMENTS: Summer's over - did the 30,000 tons get shipped? The 15,000 reusable bags made and delivered?

Unit trains of the type that haul coal empty via the gravity method: the bottom of the hopper car opens and the bulk cargo drops through grates between the rails into a bin that is emptied in an ongoing process using conveyers of one type or another (belt or even pneumatic tubes). usually the train keeps moving, albeit at a very slow pace, while the cars empty automatically over the grates which extend for more than a single car length. Question: how can bags, which must be lifted from the car (each hopper can carry over 100 tons of coal so the car should carry at least 8 bags), and then swung over to some emptying site and emptied, possibly require much less labor than the gravity method?


A.Las Vegas Test Market. U.S. Cement will build a prototype turnkey bulk bag handling cement termianl in Las Vegas, Nevada. Las Vegas currently uses approximately 2 million
tons of cement per year and is one of the fastest growing cities in the country. There are approximately 20 concrete plants in the greater Las Vegas area. U.S. Cement has a goal to provide a portion of the cement requirements of at least 50% of these potential customers in the first year of operation. U.S. Cement has already identified companies in Las Vegas and other California cities that would potentially like similar terminals to be co-located with their ready mix plants.
COMMENT: "provide a portion of the cement requirements to at least 50% of these... customers" - so let's say the portion equals 1/2 of the 50% and that these cement plants provide 1,000,000 tons of the 2 million. That would equate to 500,000 tons or 50 trainloads (100 tons per car, 100 cars per train=10,000 tons per trainload). That's one train a week, over 800 bags each.

How many bags are required to do this? Assume the bags are immediately reshipped back to Indonesia (how?) and that it takes 2 weeks to get there and at least 2 weeks to get refilled and on a ship back to the US and onto the train to Vegas. One bag roundtrip is over a month under the best of circumstances but he's got 800 arriving in Vegas every week.
And that assumes that the ships are always on a firm schedule to go from Long Beach to wherever with the coal, then to Indonesia for reloading with cement and then back to Long Beach for offloading onto the coal train that happens to be there at the same time.

The coal has to get off the unit train before the bags can go on but where does the coal go while the ship is emptied of the 800 bags? Perhaps someone in Long Beach can tell us if there are mountains of coal waiting for a bulk carrier.
The economics of the proposed system will work best if there's simultaneous unloading-loading of both commodities; haven't seen that in his plan.


B.Ship unloading facility. U.S. cement has identified a site to unload cement bulk bags that is located at the Port of Long Beach, California. It has existing rail facilities and can off-load bulk cargo vessels containing bulk bags much faster than the bulk unloading systems used by all of the existing competitors who import powdered cement.

COMMENT: lifting 12 ton bags by crane is faster than conveyer systems or pneumatic systems suck it out of the bulk carrier's hold? Never! That's one for Larry to prove.

Poke a hole or two in the scenario and it's obvious that it's pie in the sky. But creative.

Dee Jay