On a previous article from Equipment World, Caterpillar put together a team of experts including Chub Dietz, marketing/product consultant; Phil Hansen, mining commercial manager; Tom Neeley, sales support manager for undercarriage marketing and Keith Heiar, tractor products marketing.
Managing your owning and operating costs is best done through a strong relationship between the manufacturer, the contractor and the dealer. Dozers of equal weight and horsepower can more or less push the same load, but to get the most material moved per dollar you have to maximize productivity and minimize cost. Where there is value to be gained—money to be saved and productivity to be enhanced—is in working to spec the right machine for the job, making sure the operator is trained and in coordinating service and maintenance with your dealer, Dietz says.
1. Under-carriages
“Picking the right undercarriage and good undercarriage maintenance are critical to achieving the lowest operating cost per hour,” Neeley says. In an ideal world all the undercarriage parts would wear out about the same time, but they don’t. Pins and bushings go first (or need turning), typically followed by the shoes and then the rollers and links. These could be replaced or refurbished in separate maintenance procedures, but most contractors don’t want to pull the machine out of the dirt so often.
The catch is that every choice you make in spec’ing an undercarriage is going to end up changing the operating costs and the amount of downtime. There’s no one universal solution for everybody. For some it may make more financial sense to run their pins and bushings to destruction. Others may benefit from a long-life pin and bushing assembly like Cat’s SystemOne. Either way, the choice of one component in your track will influence your choices for the rest of the components.
2. Operators, productivity and fuel
Understand first, however, that typically fuel burned equals work done. The more fuel you’re burning, the more material you’re moving, so high fuel consumption is not necessarily a bad thing, Hansen says.
By giving your operators advanced training in dozer techniques you can increase the amount of work they do without increasing what you’re paying them. A good operator spends less time blading air and more time moving dirt, Hansen says, and at the end of the day may produce 10 or 20 percent more work for the same amount of wages and fuel expended. A well-trained operator will also take better care of the undercarriage and extend its life.
Safety, as it relates to operators, technicians and any employee, is also a critical part of productivity and availability, Hansen says. Even a minor accident can put a machine or a site out of operation for as much as a day. A history of accidents or safety incidents will drive up insurance costs, and drive away good employees.
And don’t forget about GPS. These machine control systems insure that you only move dirt once and maximize the return on your owning and operating costs because they eliminate errors and rework.
3. Maintenance
Other than the undercarriage considerations, it’s not worth a lot of effort to try and substantially lower your maintenance costs beyond just following good preventive maintenance practices. Your goal in good maintenance should be to increase uptime rather than trim costs.
The best bang for the buck on big dozers comes from condition-based maintenance, Hansen says. But rather than push a component right up to the edge of failure, you can take advantage of some of telematics monitoring systems to diagnose and alert you to a problem long before the machine’s performance or components start to suffer. These early warning systems not only save you from expensive catastrophic failure, they give you a bigger window of opportunity to schedule the downtime and replacement machines.
In the sections below, we’ll take a look at how all these variables come together.
In the example below, two nearly identical Caterpillar D6Rs were run in nearly identical conditions (65 percent hard sand, soil pH of 7). The only difference: the amount of rain on the jobsites. The more moisture in the soil, the more the soil gets up, in and around the rollers, sprockets and moving parts of the undercarriage; and the more wear it experiences. Just an extra inch of rain per month cuts undercarriage life by almost 25 percent and drives up the per-hour costs accordingly.
4. What a difference 1 percent makes
Not all change is equal when it comes to helping increase profits. When you review your costs and operations to see how you might get a better return on your dozer dollars, here are a few helpful facts from Caterpillar.
A one percent change in….
PRODUCTIVITY
…can result in a 2.5 to 4.5 percent change in profit.
AVAILABILITY
…can result in a 1.75 to 3.5 percent change in profit.
OPERATING COSTS
…can result in a 1.5 to 3.5 change in profit.
UTILIZATION
…can result in a 1.5 to 2.75 percent change in profit.
SELLING PRICE
…can result in a 0.5 to 0.85 percent change in profit.
For more details and insight, click this link to read the complete article on Equipment World.
