The Challenge
Fisher Wavy’s plants sit hundreds of KM apart, spanning from North Bay to Thunder Bay, with portable plants seasonally relocating and reaching as far as Lynn Lake, Manitoba. Before implementing Giatec SmartMix™ into their workflows, Marc Cronier, QC Manager, Fisher Wavy, managed mix performance mostly by phone and remote desktop access, adjusting mixes based on an operator’s description of a batch rather than real data.
Field reports were either printed or scanned paper that got messy and at times became unreadable. Cylinder breaks lived in a spreadsheet that returned only a pass or fail, with no detail behind it. Digging into a single mix meant manually filtering and copying data into a second spreadsheet just to build visual and actionable data, for example, a strength trend graph.
Mix design sprawl made the problem worse. Fisher Wavy was running roughly 400 mix designs in Sudbury and closer to 700 in Sualt Ste. Marie, with each plant location building and cataloging mix designs to its own naming convention over the years. A single mix could exist under three or four slightly different codes across plants, with four to seven variations of each design, making it hard to tell which mixes were genuinely different and which were just duplicates to suit the customer’s request.
Closing the Distance With SmartMix
That distance was what sent Fisher Wavy looking for a QC system in the first place. Marc wanted something that could close it and make the data easier to reach, no matter how far out a portable is running. The search led him to Giatec, where SmartMix’s direct link to Command Cloud, the batching software Fisher Wavy already relied on, immediately stood out.
That connection was the deciding factor. Rather than bolt on another disconnected tool, SmartMix pulled straight from data Fisher Wavy was already generating, giving Marc a single source of cost and quality information he could act on from anywhere with an internet connection.
One Standard Across Their Operation
Marc rebuilt Fisher Wavy’s mix code system before going live, consolidating those near-duplicate mixes and standardizing naming across every plant, so the same code meant the same thing everywhere. He handled that groundwork and the initial data migration himself, then brought the rest of the QC team on once the system was live.
Training was easy, quick, and well-organized, but what made SmartMix stick was simpler than that. It replaced scattered spreadsheets with one dashboard with live data everyone could see. There was no parallel manual process left to fall back on, so SmartMix became the default in Sudbury and at the portable plants almost instantly.
Fisher Wavy Saves an Estimated $16,000+ and Hours of Manual QC Work
With everyone already working from the same dashboard, that fast adoption turned into fast results. In the four months since going live, Marc has completed 16 mix optimizations for an estimated combined savings of over $16,000, cutting approximately 47 kilograms of cementitious material out of one mix alone (about 105 pounds).
The bigger shift has been in capacity. Marc estimates SmartMix saves him roughly a full year’s worth of manual QC work, hours that used to go into chasing data by hand and now go toward higher-value analysis and optimization instead.
Fisher Wavy’s QC team, most of whom have well under two years on the job, now see the same mix trend data Marc sees, rather than a bare pass or fail.
“It’s a lot easier because everything’s streamlined. The mix information and data, you get from the cylinder results, the QC team also gets a more in-depth understanding of the mix designs, because they can see the live performance data. So, I see the QC team gaining a better understanding of the mix itself and what the chemicals are doing, I see them learning and becoming a better team a lot quicker than what it used to.”
— Marc Cronier, QC Manager, Fisher Wavy
Results at a Glance
| Metric | Impact |
| $16,000+ | Estimated savings through mix optimizations in four months |
| 47 kg (~105 lb) | Cementitious material removed from the largest single optimization |
| ~1 year | Estimated QC labor time saved |
| 6 months into minutes | Manual report-building time replaced by AI reporting turnaround |
Six Months of Work in Minutes
Fisher Wavy has connected its SmartMix data to an AI reporting tool that builds full plant performance reports on request. Marc can ask for a specific comparison, such as batching accuracy across Sudbury, Thunder Bay (the most remote plant), and a portable plant, and keep working while it compiles. The reports come back with average strength, standard deviation, water-cement ratio, slump trends, and month-by-month admixture dosing accuracy for each plant, along with plain-language findings. Marc estimates building the same report by hand, pulling and cross-referencing that much data manually, would take at least six months.
“Best tool ever. That alone saves me hours and hours of typing, because all you have to do is ask for what you want. Then I go do other tasks or visit job sites, and when I return to it later, it gives me a report. I’m doing two things at once.”
— Marc Cronier, QC Manager, Fisher Wavy
Looking Ahead
Marc sums up the shift in one line: SmartMix has modernized how Fisher Wavy runs QC, replacing guesswork with data his whole team can see and act on quickly. What started as a fix for one problem, getting visibility into remote plants, has changed how the company approaches quality control everywhere, from Sudbury to the portables in Manitoba.
“It’s a worthwhile investment in improving your mix performance and your data output for QC, visualizing plant accuracy, and it’s the perfect tool for optimization, which helps move towards sustainability.”
— Marc Cronier, QC Manager, Fisher Wavy
