Hastings Deering’s HDAdvantage and Cat App help Q H & M Birt manage its equipment 24/7.
With up to 245 pieces of Caterpillar equipment working at any one time, the team at QH & M Birt has turned to the Cat App to help it better manage its equipment.
QH & M Birt, one of Queensland’s largest civil construction and mining companies, has been using the app to help it manage its fleet as it works on developing the subgrade structure on Section D of the Queensland State Government’s Bruce Highway Upgrade.
A 26km, four-lane divided highway between Curra and Woodnum – near Gympie – Section D of the Queensland Government’s Bruce Highway upgrades will lift the road out of the way of floods that have caused frequent road closures, as well as separating long-distance traffic from local traffic.
QH & M Birt has moved over 3.3 million cubic metres of dirt so far for its bulk earthworks portion of the project, company health safety committee trainer and assessor Shaun Blewitt says, using the Cat App to help monitor machine location and health all the way.
“The size of the Caterpillar fleet in QH & M Birt incorporates 245 pieces of Caterpillar equipment alone, and that ranges in everything from a little skid steer to our big dump trucks, which we monitor daily and weekly with the use of the Caterpillar app,” he says.
The Cat App is an efficient equipment management application that enables the team to track equipment, order service and parts, and working with dealer Hastings Deering to connect their assets.
“The benefits of using the Cat App here at the Cooroy to Curra Section D project, means we can monitor all the systems that are linked up to the service, and it gives us a live feed to maintenance that is required or faults that are coming through, from operator error, mis-maintenance and maintenance planning,” Blewitt adds.
A companion to my.Cat.Com (MCC), the Cat App delivers simplified, streamlined data directly to a mobile or tablet device, allowing teams to react faster to fault codes and maximise uptime.
“It also keeps things safer, if someone puts it into drive without having their seatbelt on first, we get an alarm instantly and we can correct that through one-on-one interaction with the operator,” Blewitt says.
“The Cat App is very user friendly; and its quite easy to get the team trained up, especially with the assistance of Chris Caine and the professionals down in Brisbane.”
In early 2021, the team from Hastings Deering started working with Q H & M Birt using HDAdvantage, the Cat App and my.cat.com as tools to provide productivity analytics throughout the project.
Hastings Deering construction support supervisor Chris Caine says the analytics help minimise downtime by helping the team remotely manage equipment, preventative maintenance intervals and machine health.
“The Cat App is a complementary service, available on your phone, tablet and it can also be viewed through your computer under my.cat.com,” Blewitt says.
“The productivity analytics in the app give you the ability to see what machines have been utilised for the last seven days. At a glance you can see machines that have excessively idled or been underutilised.”
The HDAdvantage program was designed by Hastings Deering to run alongside the Cat App to increase the reliability and profit-making potential of Cat equipment thanks to proactive monitoring of machine maintenance and health issues.
“HD Advantage is a condition monitoring service that we offer to our customers, it involves looking at the electronic data from the machines, oil samples and Cat Inspect inspections,” Blewitt says
“With those three pieces of data, along with the strong relationship with our customers, we can start to look at issues on the machine that need to be addressed. Whether its next service, immediate stop, and we give the information to the customer to go and troubleshoot the problem.”
“Q H & M Birt’s relationship with Hastings Deering obviously starts at the acquisition of plant machinery, not only that, the service, maintenance and technical expertise that we can call in 24 hours a day, the advantage now with the Cat App, is we get that extra aftersales service,” he adds.