It is important for concrete producers to design and optimise concrete mixes to ensure that they perform to the required level while minimising their cost. It is also important to monitor the performance of these mixes on an ongoing basis to ensure that they continue to perform at the desired level. Spectra QEST provides tools to undertake all of these tasks (see Quality Control, Mix Management, and Mix Design & Optimisation sections).

Historically, the ongoing monitoring of the performance of mixes has been a very laborious and complex process for concrete producers. Spectra QEST has addressed some of these difficulties by providing tools (QESTLab and QESTMix) to allow concrete producers to quickly and easily produce the reports which allow them to make their assessments. Spectra QEST now takes this process to the next level, by developing the QESTMonitor module which automatically assesses key parameters (such as concrete strength, density, yield, combined and individual material gradings, batch quantities and testing frequencies) daily, weekly or monthly, raising alerts if the values fall outside predefined or statistical limits and makes recommendations for mix adjustments.

This eliminates two problems that many concrete producers have, which are:

• a lack of suitably qualified technical staff with sufficient time to assess the large volumes of data that are required to accurately monitor mix performance; and
• different interpretations of the data by different staff (even if consistent reports are provided throughout the organisation) leading to inconsistent outcomes across the business.

For more information on QESTMonitor please click here.