John Lyon, loadout manager for Titan America’s Pennsuco facility in Medley, Fla., offers these quick tips to developing and maintaining a good relationship between an aggregates operation and a trucking/transportation company delivering an operation’s material.

• Make yourself accessible to customers and haulers.

• Listen to truck drivers’ complaints or concerns and address the reasonable issues. For example, Lyon says, complaining about the color of a building isn’t a reasonable request.

• Look for ways to get a truck in and out of the plant as efficiently and painlessly as possible. “You want it to be as seamless as possible,” Lyon says.

• Never ship off-spec material and never sacrifice quality for expediency. “I’d rather call a customer and tell him that his job is shutdown and that I’ve just cost him “X” amount in labor and equipment rental than ship something that could fail…and who knows what the consequences could be down the line,” Lyon says.

“If you take care of these four things, you’ve gone a long way toward ensuring a good operation,” he says.