Features Roads & Paving Technology
Wirtgen Group hosts Technology Days in Nashville

April 4, 2018 – More than 1,200 people flocked to Nashville at the end of March to check out live demonstrations of the Wirtgen Group’s latest technologies during the company’s Technology Days North America 2018 event held at the company’s North American headquarters in Antioch, Tenn.

The two-day event also featured a ribbon-cutting ceremony marking the completion of the expansion of the company’s Center for Training and Technology (CTT), also located on the grounds of Wirtgen America’s headquarters. The CTT is a world-class facility for educating road and minerals technology professionals.

Wirtgen America president and CEO Jim McEvoy and Dominic Ruccolo, CEO of the Wirtgen Group, performed the ribbon cutting.

McEvoy said that offering the latest technologies for the road building and aggregates sectors needs to come backed up with proper training options for the company’s customers, dealers and its own staff.

“We see this training effort being hand-in-hand with our value proposition,” he told the crowd. “We see this facility as being really critical. We put just under 3,000 through the facility in 2017.”

One focus of the CTT expansion project was the expanding of the curriculum offered at the facility for customers and their employees.

“For a lot of them its about raising the competency of their labour and service techs,” McEvoy said, adding that a few of the new rooms were designed so the CTT can also offer more online remote training.

The CTT was originally built in 2009, but the company found over the years that some of the classrooms were built too large for the type of training they wanted to offer their customers. In addition to more smaller classrooms and increased overall square footage, the expanded CTT also has technology rooms designed specifically for each of the Wirtgen Group’s brands: Wirtgen, Vögele, Hamm and Kleemann. The rooms feature high-tech learning tools such as interactive displays and product simulators. There are also products on display throughout the CTT that show how the technologies work and how they can improve various types of road building and crushing operations.

The CTT even has a dedicated lab and classroom on site that offers training modules to ensure the company’s customers create the right mixes for their paving operations and optimize their recycling operations.

“We know how the technologies work, can show them process control techniques, and can make sure they’re applied properly,” said Loyd Amos, a member of Wirtgen America’s recycling team that was on site offering a tour of the lab’s classroom. “We’ll even go to them if they want to learn more about this before they get into the technologies.”

Going forward after the expansion, the company expects to train about 5,000 people a year at the CTT.

In addition to the tour of the CTT, attendees at the event had the opportunity to watch a wide variety of live product demonstrations from the Wirtgen Group’s four brands, and see how many of the technologies can be used together.

Matt Graves, director of marketing and communications for the Wirtgen Group, offers the press a look at the new Vögele RoadScan contactless temperature-measurement system.