Gerald Hanisch - Grinding out the fine details

Rubble Master describes itself as a company “located in Linz, but at home all over the world”.

With a business based in Austria’s third largest city since the company set up in 1991, and a support network of 100 dealers in 70 countries, both parts of the basic statement are clearly true.

However, neither of them tells the full story.

Firstly, the company started small. Its first technical research and development department was housed in a garage. It has outgrown its humble beginnings since – moving to a new factory in 2001, which itself was expanded further seven years later – as the product range has grown, to a point where Rubble Master looks set to achieve its targeted manufacturing output for 2020 a whole three years early.

As for the international outlook, according to Rubble Master CEO Gerald Hanisch it was there all the time.

“It’s important to say we created a company that was determined to work on an international basis from the beginning,” said Gerald.

“We needed to be professional enough to be able to cope with an international market, to offer the best solutions with no compromises.”

If the global position that Rubble Master has established for itself in the past 25 years appears to speak for itself, Gerald is quick to point out that it has not been a quarter of a century of continuous success.

“The timeline looks quite gentle, but there have always been challenges in the company’s history,” he said.

“These ranged from the machines to the industry itself. On the industry side, we were introducing a completely new concept – compact crushing as well as recycling. The challenge with the machines was keeping up with continual development and customer feedback. It was well worth it. Today we have the best impactor on the market.

“We gained some strength from overcoming these problems, and now we’re on a growth path and trying to sustain it.

“I go back to the earliest days of the company when I was involved in sales, service, parts, any kind of contact with the customer out in the field. I learned then that if a machine is down, it’s not productive.

”So it was important to have response times in terms of hours, and to build a workforce over the years that would carry these ideas forward. We got in touch with universities, we developed our own training school. We invested a lot but the results are amazing.

“Expanding into new regions is important as well. We have picked up really excellent dealers this year and they will play a big role in the expansion mission.

“The other point is that we are always on the edge of technology and innovation – customers know this and choose Rubble Master because of it.”

New premises, more space

Gerald said the next big step was the move to new premises just after the turn of the century. Having launched the RM50 compact recycling crusher soon after the company started out, it was five years before the next model, the RM60, was developed. If the company was to make more and bigger products, it had to create the space to do so.

“The RM60 was crucial to the overall development of the company,” said Gerald.

“The crushing chamber geometry was revolutionary – a mono block impact curtain with features around the crusher box and process that had never been seen before. It was these technological features, and the development of them, that led to the product portfolio that exists today.

“The new factory was a major milestone. From that point we were ready to grow. From there, we could produce the RM70, the RM100 and the Go! range, which is one of the industry standards.”

It also coincided with Rubble Master’s international breakthrough with the RM80 product, a flexible impact crusher for all applications, while in 2003 the company’s first screens and mobile oversize material separator were launched. The following year marked the opening of the company’s service centre in Linz.

Outdoor demonstrations

To mark 25 years in business, Rubble Master held an event for customers and dealers called Xperience Days. It was not the first time it had taken place, but the milestone that the company had achieved gave it an extra edge. A large part of the outdoor demonstrations, which took place on a sun-baked Friday afternoon at the Linz site, was given over to the RM120Go!

It’s the latest in a series of products based on the original models that allows users to start them up quickly and easily. In the case of the 120Go! it also opens up a new market for Rubble Master. “One of the main goals in developing the product was the flexibility of using the mobile RM crusher in both recycling and processing natural stone,” said Gerald.

The occasion also included the introduction of Go!Smart, a form of machine communication that enables monitoring of the performance and status of key machine parameters. Rubble Master thought it was vital that it could be used in conjunction with existing technology such as smart phones and tablets, and the Basic version will be available at the start of next year. Plus and Premium options are set to be added in the following 12 months, offering services such as troubleshooting directly via smart phone.

Xperience Days was also the setting for the launch of Spec2App. Described by Gerald Hanisch as being “like a toolkit full of USPs with a 100% degree of standardisation”, it was developed to ensure the optimum recycling of materials including construction and demolition waste with a single crusher.

“We wanted to set a standard in the industry and the Go!, system was it” said Gerald.

“Quality is the key, to keeping customers and finding new ones. It’s the main issue. The Rubble Master Academy is one example. Both employees and dealers get the chance to learn about the machines, the industry and our organisation. The quality that we provide from a spare parts and after sales perspective is another – the service is on an incredibly high level.

“Rubble Master has always stood for quality, not just in the products but in how we have grown the organisation, servicing, how we train our people, our dealers…and we won’t stop doing that.”

*Article originally published in the November-December 2016 issue of D&Ri. To register to receive the magazine on a regular basis, please visit www.khl.com/subscriptions