The staff at Foremost Stettler with the 1,000th truck on the production floor on Thurs. Jan. 23.
The 1,000th truck is a Rival T10 model. ECA Review/Submitted
Foremost Stettler has reached a huge milestone, assembling their 1000th hydrovac truck, a Rival T-10 model.
The milestone was celebrated in January at the shop in Stettler where the majority of their 170 employees were present for the occasion.
“It’s been pretty neat to see, I mean having been here myself since the first truck and now seeing it in such a short time in perspective of how fast it ramped up,” said Joe Huraj, operations manager at the Stettler Foremost facility.
“It’s gone almost exponentially over the last little while with the amount of trucks [made] so yeah it’s quite neat to see,” he said.
March 2012 was when the company decided to expand their horizons by getting into manufacturing hydrovac trucks from other forms of mobile equipment.
“This other platform was the urban utility market and that really took off also that gave us another avenue to grow the product line and yeah we just basically clawed our way month over month by refining how we do stuff in our processes,” said Huraj.
From start to finish, Stettler pumps out roughly 20 trucks per month with multiple stages taking place at once to get the turnaround time done.
“We fabricate all the steel stuff with a few exceptions from the larger components.
We have to buy them in pieces all in house and then we have our own blast and wet liquid paint process. We do all the bodywork and painting and everything else here and then final assembly,” said Huraj.
“So basically a bare truck chassis comes in and then everything else we put together or build and they roll out a finished, ready-to-work unit.”
A distributor in the United States, as well as one in Red Deer, take the majority of buyers with taking over the sales and distribution of the vehicles.
By May 2017, they had reached the 500 truck mark with the 750th truck getting done in November 2018.
Foremost is situated in Stettler, Calgary, Lloydminster and Grand Prairie which all have different acquisitions including agriculture and oil and gas.
Terri Huxley
ECA Review
