Holcim’s Kujawy Quarry in Poland is the first quarry in mainland Europe to use Cat MineStar Edge for its quarry-face-to-crusher loading and hauling. Aggregates Business visited the giant limestone site to learn more about its impressive impact.
Mateusz Czarnomski is a big fan of Cat MineStar Edge. Holcim Kujawy Quarry’s deputy mining operations manager says analysis of load-and-haul machine performance data generated by the state-of-the-art system has enabled quarry management to cut haul truck fuel consumption by up to 10% by reducing idling time at its larger crusher material dumping point.
“We have one primary 1,200-tonne-per-hour crusher for our white limestone, and a 400-tonne-per-hour auxiliary crusher for our dark limestone, which contains more silica oxide. With Cat MineStar Edge, we went from running five filled trucks to the primary crusher to four trucks, significantly reducing idling times,” says Czarnomski during Aggregates Business’s visit in early September 2025.
Czarnomski notes that Cat MineStar Edge has also helped Holcim Kujawy optimise haul truck payloads, increasing them to 65 tonnes per truck, up from 62 tonnes per truck before its introduction. This has increased production tonnage while reducing truck cycles, saving more fuel and reducing truck wear, extending maintenance intervals.
“Cat MineStar Edge is the answer to some questions that had been left unanswered for some time,” continues Czarnomski. “Sometimes, our white or dark limestone does not go where it should, but for a long time, we lacked a resource for tracking the amount of each material sent to each crusher dumping point. The system helps us run our load-and-haul machines more efficiently and sustainably.
“Every shift ends with a report that shows the total production. You can benchmark, for instance, performance on specific haul routes. We can then determine the typical cycle time for each route, from the loading point to the dumping point, and help achieve better productivity.”
Cat MineStar Edge was fully introduced at Holcim Kujawy in November 2024, following its longtime championing by Sylwester Sroka, Aggregates Performance director at Holcim Poland, to the company’s fellow senior managers. Sroka worked closely with Łukasz Kuczer, Site Performance manager – Caterpillar Job Site Solutions, to finalise and install the Cat MineStar system on five of Kujawy’s wheeled loaders (2x Cat 988K XE, 2x Cat 990K and 1x Cat 990), and eight of its rigid haulers (3x Cat 775s and 5x Cat 775Gs).
“We got our first Caterpillar machines [for Holcim Kujawy] in 2017 and started discussions about what supporting software we could use to manage the fleet,” says Sroka. “I wanted real-time data that could support the quarry manager. We started using Cat VisionLink Productivity and then, in 2023, began discussions with Łukasz and Sascha [Fuchs, commercial manager in Poland for Caterpillar Job Site Solutions] about running a pilot of Cat MineStar Edge.”
In a November 2023 trip facilitated by Caterpillar Job Site Solutions, Bergerat Monnoyeur Polska and Finning UK, the UK and Ireland’s Caterpillar dealer, Sroka and Aneta Sypniewska-Chlewicka, production director at Holcim Kujaway, visited Cemex UK’s Dove Holes Quarry near Buxton, Derbyshire, England, where Cat MineStar Edge is being used to optimise the site’s loading and hauling.
“We liked what we saw at Dove Holes Quarry and began a [Cat MineStar Edge] pilot with one Cat wheeled loader in the second half of last year. Now we are using it on all our haul trucks and wheeled loaders.”
Commenting on what she took away from her visit to Dove Holes Quarry and how Cat MineStar Edge is being used at Holcim Kujawy Quarry, Sypniewska-Chlewicka says: “It was good to speak to the loader and hauler drivers. They said that at first they thought the system was part of management’s effort to control them, but soon they treated the generated performance data as a tournament to see who was the best driver. We also saw how the haul truck operators were queuing [at the crusher dumping points] and, while doing so, trying to reduce idling time.
“It emphasised the importance of speaking to our load and haul operators day by day, shift by shift. If they are waiting to load or dump material, they could be radioing their supervisor to see if there is other useful work they can be doing.
“We check Cat MineStar Edge in real time, but sometimes we don’t have information that something is wrong [with the load and haul operation], which is why we engage closely with our operators. It has also been great working with Łukasz [Kuczer], who arranges regular meetings to give us an overview of what is going on, including our drivers’ behaviour and the supporting data we can present to them.
“Łukasz trained all our loader and hauler operators on how to use Cat MineStar Edge. Our operators liked this, and they feel we are really engaging with them —not just via the system, but through the overall communication we have shift by shift. They feel the company is investing in them and the machines they work with.”
Sypniewska-Chlewicka notes that Cat MineStar Edge has reduced machine wear and improved site safety after helping to identify an issue with haul truck speeding.
On the usability of Cat MineStar Edge, she adds: “I find it easy to use and extract information. We use a drone from time to time to generate updated imagery of the quarry’s layout and working faces, which the system uses in its work.”
Cat MineStar Edge’s ‘Production Recording‘ helps sites identify efficiency and productivity opportunities by providing visibility into the entire quarrying or mining operation. When paired with the system’s ‘Equipment Tracking’, it delivers an accurate and automated near-real-time solution that measures and reports on every aspect of the load-haul-dump cycle, eliminating the need for operator input. The result is a boost in productivity and a reduction in the overall operating costs of managed assets, including quarries/mines, materials, and machines.
For many sites, traditional comprehensive fleet management systems can be too complex and cost-prohibitive, requiring significant investments in time and money to set up and maintain. ‘Production Recording’, however, is an easy-to-use subscription-based solution that delivers the key functionality all sites require: accurate, real-time production data.
Operated via a cloud-based application, Cat MineStar Edge replaces pencil and paper with accurate recording, helping supervisors better understand utilisation and make decisions about equipment investments and effectiveness. Users can drill down to view the performance of specific entities, including individual machines, areas, routes, materials, and operators.
Site supervisors can review material transactions and movement from the load face to the dump, including the times, machines, and operators involved, pinpointing potential pain points as well as best practice examples.
Holcim Kujaway’s Cat MineStar Edge supervisor panel overview is constantly updated in near real-time, as are the in-cab Loader and Truck monitor displays. Using a system screen grab example, Czarnomski illustrates how pink and orange colours are used to distinguish between white and dark limestone stockpiles to be worked on by loader and haul truck operators.
He continues: “A shift supervisor may want to change a haul truck driver’s route that day, as he wants them to focus on dark rather than white limestone, to help meet a certain production target. With Cat MineStar Edge, the driver can see the change on their in-cab monitor and adjust their work. Each haul truck driver can also see, as they work, how far away they are from reaching their daily production target.“
In addition to its deployment at Cemex UK’s Dove Holes Quarry, Cat MineStar Edge is also being used at Holcim UK’s limestone super-quarry, Glensanda, north of Oban in Scotland. The cutting-edge system’s hardware includes Cat Product Link hardware.
Quarrying and mining customers using Cat MineStar Edge are charged per loader and haul fleet machine utilising its capabilities. Czarnomski stresses that Cat MineStar Edge has freed up a Holcim Kujawy employee from performing a paper-based analysis of load-and-haul truck performance, allowing them to focus on other important on-site work. The quarry’s Caterpillar load-and-haul machine fleet is maintained under a Caterpillar Total Maintenance & Repair (TM&R) contract administered by Cat Job Site Solutions.
Holcim Kujawy produces between seven and eight million tonnes of white and dark limestone annually. Its product range spans 0mm to 135mm. Of its annual production, around 1 million tonnes is dark limestone, which has a higher silica content. Holcim Kujawy’s cement plant uses half of that, along with around 1.5 million tonnes a year of the quarry’s white limestone. Around 60% of Holcim Kujawy’s annual production is sold to external customers, including, among others, residential and commercial construction companies, highway contractors, and concrete producers.
Holcim Kujawy is a ‘zero-waste‘ operation. A giant water supply solution installed in 2023 pumps around 750,000m³ of water a year from the quarry to a neighbouring forest as part of a major local biodiversity and wildlife enhancement project. An impressive 98% of cement production at Holcim Kujawy is powered by biowaste, more than halving (from 800kg to 312-314kg) CO₂ emissions per tonne of produced cement.
Around two million tonnes of quarry overburden are processed annually. In addition to being used for tree planting, some of the processed overburden is being utilised to create an area designated for a photovoltaic system to power part of Holcim Kujaway’s limestone production.
Another strong sustainability feature of Holcim Kujaway’s operation in recent years has been its seven machine rebuilds completed using the Cat Certified Rebuild Program (four Cat haul trucks and three Cat 990K wheeled loaders). In addition, one of the previously rebuilt Cat 990Ks will soon undergo a second rebuild, extending the machine’s lifespan to a third.
“Each loader and haul truck has an average working life of 16,000 hours. A rebuild is like having a new machine, guaranteeing its technical availability at 55%-60% of the cost of buying a new model,“ explains Piotr Pawlowski, Bergerat Monnoyeur Polska North West branch manager. “It shows the quality of the machine that it can be rebuilt not just once, but twice. You can keep production at the same level without the higher cost of buying a new machine. The twice-rebuilt Cat 990K will have its working life extended to over 50,000 hours.“
Holcim Kujawy operates from 6:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m., Monday to Friday, with 135 employees working across two shifts. Adding site contractor employees takes the worker headcount to 230.
During Aggregates Business’s tour of Holcim Kujaway, Mariusz Olszanowski is busy loading Cat haul trucks with limestone from the bucket of his Cat 990 wheeled loader. Asked what he thinks about Cat MineStar Edge, he replies: “The Cat 990’s cabin is big enough, so the MineStar Edge in-cab monitor does not get in the way of me doing my loading tasks, as it might do in a smaller cab. I like to see all my machine data in near real time, including the leaderboard showing how I am performing compared to my colleagues. It motivates me!”
