New purchases have included eight Komatsu excavators (three PC400s, four PC300s and three PC200s) as well as a Komatsu D39 dozer and a D41 dozer and eight major Gomaco paving machines. The company also rents equipment from RMS.
“Our excavators are great and the dozers are very dependable,” Hass asserted. “We just send them out in the spring and bring them back in the fall. We don’t do much to them in between. Our whole Gomaco paving fleet has come from RMS in about the last 10 years,” he added.
Ken Kopf was recently overseeing the underground work for a new subdivision project where Valley Construction crews were using a new Komatsu PC200-7. Kopf said he likes the way the excavator works. “It’s a great machine. It has the horsepower and it’s light. It stands up in this mud.”
Regular maintenance, safety priority
Kopf has operated equipment for more than 20 years. “I’ve run them all, and you can’t beat Komatsu. They’re balanced and we haven’t had many problems with them. Basically, if you take care of them and do regular maintenance, they last forever.”
The company follows a basic maintenance program, according to Hass, with 200-hour service intervals and oil sampling. “We also rely on feedback from our operators, and we always do winter maintenance,” he reported.
Valley Construction has six mechanics on its payroll but also uses RMS service technicians.
This paving job on a city
street is just one of 20 or
30 projects underway at
one time by Valley
Construction crews.
“The RMS guys are very good,” stated Hass. “If we need a part, we’ll usually get it by the next morning if they don’t have it in stock.”
While good maintenance is important to production, it’s also a factor in safety. “We have an intense safety program,” explained Hass. “We have a full-time safety manager, Shawn Meier, and we have one of the lowest EMR ratings in the Midwest, which is how insurance companies judge you for your insurance rating. We always do pre-job hazard analyses, make sure safety equipment is always available and we do lots of safety training. We have received several awards for being one of the safest contractors in the state of Illinois.”
2002 Contractor of the Year
Dealing with tight completion times and the weather can be some of their biggest challenges, according to Hass, as well as making sure customers are satisfied. That customer satisfaction is a big reason why much of the company’s work is based on their reputation for quality. In fact, Valley Construction was named by the state of Illinois as Illinois Contractor of the Year for 2002. It’s an honor that Hass says belongs to his crews as well as to management.
“We have excellent employees,” he acknowledged. “We always try to hire quality people to run the jobs as well as work on the jobs and we try to instill quality into their design and work ethic so they produce a quality project. Many of our customers have very tight quality control for standards and specs in their work, and we won’t leave the job until they’re happy.”
Although they face many challenges in the industry, Hass looks forward to the challenges and enjoys the company’s successes. “It’s something different every day, and it’s always neat to see a job start, then see the end result, the finished product.
“We’re fortunate to have high-quality employees and high-quality supervision as well as an ability as a company to diversify,” he added. “During the years that private work might be slow, we can fall back on doing municipal and state work. We can adapt. And we’ve been able to grow through the hard work of our employees. We work as a team and we all have a common goal of being successful,” Hass concluded.