...tractor, an International Harvester TD-14, for $6,500. Dwayne paid nothing down but agreed to give his father hard labor in exchange. He immediately put the dozer to work carving out small retention ponds in southern Iowa.

Dwayne ran the tractor in the afternoon and fixed it at night, with little time left over for class, homework or Glennis, his high-school sweetheart. But he was determined to do it all. By the end of the summer, he had graduated from high school, found his future wife, paid back his father and started booking work in the Des Moines area.

George, a former Marine whom friends called “Chief,” was an itinerant farmer who performed earthmoving jobs on the side for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. He and Dwayne began working together as independent contractors.

Dwayne’s ability developed fast. One day, George told Dwayne that he had become the better earthmover. “It broke my heart,” Dwayne remembers, and he had a similar moment with his son, Doug, years later: “Now, I can say that Doug is better at it than I ever was, and it makes me proud.” Doug became president and COO of McAninch Corp. in 2003.

The McAninch family (above; early days with Roy Sanford (below).

Dwayne’s business started to grow from word-of-mouth referrals, and he added an International TD-24, one of the largest production dozers at the time. But he soon found that the model, which became notorious for breakdowns, was a bleeder. “Every time you’d earn $100, you’d spend $100 repairing it,” he recalls.

McAninch invited his friend, Roy Sanford, to join the fun. They had a strict dress code—pressed pants and a white tee shirt. The dozers had no climate-controlled cabs to protect them, and dust got everywhere. Dwayne jokes, “I started out the day clean” but “at least I knew the dirt on me was one day old.”

In 1959, Dwayne married Sanford’s sister, Glennis. “You will never meet a fairer, more generous or kinder person,” she says about Dwayne, who replies, “I wouldn’t trade my wife for all the bulldozers in America.”

Army stint taught McAninch maintenance and safety.

McAninch enlisted in the U.S. Army Reserve in 1958 and trained as a heavy equipment operator at Fort Leonard Wood, Mo. He studied rigorous safety and maintenance techniques and earned the rank of staff sergeant. Six months later, he was back in Iowa moving dirt.

Dwayne, Roy and George built up a diverse project portfolio. In 1962, Dwayne traded in his TD-14 for a Caterpillar D7 costing $28,000. It was the start of a relationship that has lasted for decades. “He is one of the poster people for Caterpillar,” says De Stigter.

Moving the earth was not always so easy for McAninch. After he founded McAninch Corp. in 1967, he quickly built the business into the largest earthmoving enterprise in Iowa. In 1978, he added underground utilities and then opened offices in Texas and Colorado to build oil and gas pipelines.

Almost overnight, it expanded into concrete and asphalt paving and was on its way to being a national player. But in 1982, economic recession took a toll on pipeline construction, forcing McAninch to liquidate millions of dollars of equipment at a loss, shutter the national offices and lay off employees. “That just started a domino effect financially,” says Sanford, the firm’s executive vice president. Annual revenue fell from $30 million to $13 million and rumors spread across Iowa that the giant earthmover was on the verge of bankruptcy.

In the Bowl. A company-owned welding shop in Des Moines is home to some of McAninch’s wildest creations.

McAninch retrenched to his core business and studied the efficiency of his equipment in the field, leading him to drop motorized scrapers from the fleet and began building his own line of custom pull scrapers. An unmarked welding shop in a Des Moines industrial park is home to some of his wildest creations. “He’s like the mad professor with equipment,” says Patrick Ruelle, McAninch’s director of business development.

According to McAninch, the custom scrapers cut support equipment and fuel consumption by 50%. To some, they are a bizarre sight, but Myers notes that pulling scrapers with modern high-drive tractors and GPS control is “an old-fashioned method with a new twist.”

Cats ‘n’ Cans. McAninch’s high-drive tractors, GPS antennas and pull scrapers are a custom blend of old and new earthmoving methods.

As McAninch became more obsessed with emerging technologies, his company developed its own estimating software that is still in use today. “I think a lot of people go out of business because they are unwilling to recognize that they need to make some adjustments to be here 10 years from now,” says David A. Manning, McAninch’s CFO. During the work season, McAninch now moves an average 250,000 cu yd of earth per day.

Bouncing Back

After several years of laying low, the company made another unsuccessful attempt to expand nationally, this time in Chicago. But in 1992, it pulled out. When Dwayne stumbled on 3-D controls one year later, he jumped at the chance to use them to extend the construction season and win low-bid contracts in other states.

So far, this strategy has worked, and company revenue has nearly tripled in the past 10 years. McAninch has backlog in five states, including a $40.4-million roadbuilding contract in North Carolina that is set to wrap up one year early, in 2007. Officials at the North Carolina Dept. of Transportation are excited about GPS. “I wish I had another job that I could let to them,” says Dan Grissom, project manager for NCDOT.

The company has plans for more gradual nationwide expansion over the next 10 years to offset the frosty Iowa winters. Don Taylor, vice president of McAninch’s national division, says that working in the Midwest earthmoving business, which only gets about 150 days of ideal weather every year, “is kind of like being a retailer.”

Taking Chances

McAninch’s use of GPS is an inspiring exam ple for the rest of the industry. Mark R. Pflederer, Caterpillar’s chief technology officer, says the controls have transformed construction because McAninch “was willing to apply it, to train his people how to use it and to take a chance.” Other people in high places say the project controls are helping them get more out of annual construction budgets. “Dwayne’s a forward-thinker,” remarks Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack (D).

The Iowa entrepreneur is a gambler at heart. Attached to his house in the country is a 6,400-sq-ft garage containing a muscle-car collection, dozens of vintage neon signs and a custom-made craps table. He takes frequent weekend trips to Chicago with his wife, children and grandchildren. While everyone else is sleeping, McAninch likes to get up very early and play blackjack at the local casinos.

“But he knows when to quit,” says Bill Knapp, one of Iowa’s largest land developers and a close friend. The earthmover is generous, annually giving an average of $1 million to charities and $100,000 to politicians—mostly Democrats.

Even former President Bill Clinton knows of McAninch and his passion for yellow steel. He spent an afternoon at McAninch’s house in 1996 on his way to a fund-raiser for Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa). McAninch showed off his car collection, which includes a rare 1968 Ford XL GT and a 1958 Corvette. Clinton later scribbled off a note to him that says, “I think about those great cars of yours every day. I wish I had them all.”

On Tour. McAninch gave Iowa State $165,000 to perform studies of soil compaction methods in the U.S.

Next Steps

McAninch Corp. is taking machine controls to higher levels of complexity. Last year, McAninch donated $165,000 to Iowa State University to build a $350,000 mobile research laboratory. The school is using the lab to study soil characteristics for nearby DOTs. It also is taking part in a $600,000 Transportation Research Board study of “intelligent” soil compaction, a popular method in Europe. Machine controls tied into GPS receivers are critical to the new compaction method. McAninch hopes his research efforts, which Caterpillar is watching closely, will lead to industry-wide adoption in the U.S.

If it works, the equipment would yield “a better product for the public at a lower price,” says John Adam, operations chief for Iowa DOT. McAninch says it could add decades of life to pavements. “Think about the ability to stretch limited transportation budgets,” adds Vilsack.

Thinking Ahead. In the future, grade controls on excavators could take the human element out of dangerous trench work, McAninch says. Other candidates for grade controls are paving and compaction machines.

Beyond validating intelligent compaction, McAninch continues to use GPS to increase efficiency, for example, by monitoring production cycles (ENR 11/7 p. 17). Further out, he sees construction project teams embracing a “free flow” of electronic data from consulting engineer to contractor to the equipment operator.

Just like his company, McAninch doesn’t stand still very long. But he has not forgotten his roots, either. The legacy he brings to earthmoving, far beyond tractor-pulled scrapers and digital machine control, is showing others how to apply new technology to traditional techniques. “Whenever anybody talks about the old-time earthmoving methods, that’s still the best way,” he says, as his face sneaks out a devilish grin.

Comments

April 20, 2006
Looking for High-tech Dirt Work

Although I am only 25, I have a better understanding of equipment and grading operations than most. I love taking a set of plans, and changing the face of our world. Unfortunately I got lost on the way to collage and have been operating equipment for the last 7 years, instead of following my dream of becoming a civil engineer. My experience has been limited to traditional staking and topcon laser systems, however am deeply fascinated by the potential of GPS and other industry innovations covered by ENR over the years. I have read ENR since a young age, and followed many of the industry innovations through your magazine. I love the dirt, and feel I have something to offer the industry. I would like to get more involved with some of the earth moving innovation's covered in recent issues of ENR. My hope is that you could point me in the right direction.

Editor's Note:
The Award of Excellence article never credits Dwayne McAninch for the longtime partnership between Caterpillar Inc. and Trimble Navigation Ltd. As stated in the article, McAninch was instrumental in the joint-venture the two companies formed in 2002.

April 24, 2006
Second Opinion

Mr. Anderson’s comments are somewhat curious to me.  In 1999 I was hired by Dwayne and Doug McAninch to investigate and implement emerging technologies applicable to the science of earthmoving. Other than CATERPILLAR, they had no knowledge of specific manufacturers, vendors or suppliers of GPS equipment.  

Our first goal did not involve GPS machine control or guidance, but rather survey grade mapping equipment.  Thus, the first purchase was a GPS base station and back pack along with a total station to check the reliability of the original ground topography map obtained from consulting engineers.            

It may well be true that Mr. Anderson met Dwayne somewhere prior to 1997.  However, I have never met or heard of Mr. Anderson and he certainly was not a procuring cause of the relationship that has developed between the McAninch Corporation, Trimble Navigation and Caterpillar.

Patrick J. Ruelle
Director of Business Development
West Des Moines, IA

April 10, 2006
Balderdash

2005 Award of Excellence Winner Dwayne McAninch This is the most misleading I've ever read. I was involved with computer-aided earthmoving software in 1987 with Trimble's predecessor.

To give Mr. McAninch (savvy as he is) credit for the marriage between Cat and Trimble is just balderdash. I'm disappointed to discover that "human interest" is more important than accuracy.

Steve Anderson
EOS Grou