Heavy Equipment Blog

Winter can be a long and grueling time for contractors and fleet managers. Contractors have to dig in while business slows and working conditions become harsh. Fleet managers must deal with the arduous tasks of winterizing equipment and performing extensive inspections.

Managers who perform scheduled oil samplings, or S.O.S., at regular intervals throughout the year are in a great position to make the most efficient use of their winter downtime and avoid running into costly mechanical issues on job sites in the spring.The samples enable them to identify which machines have abnormal metal or contaminant levels in them and are more likely to require unscheduled maintenance when put back to work.

Water trucks are a staple of many industries including agriculture, construction, and, especially, mining. In some parts of the United States their presence on construction and mine sites is required by dust control regulations.

Dust is an inescapable by-product of the industries we serve at ACTParts. Earth movers are in the dirt all day every day and not keeping the dust under control can be a dangerous and expensive oversight both for the workers nearby and the equipment on site. It can also open contractors up to regulatory fines for non-compliance with local and federal laws. In fact, the EPA has been known to shut down job sites that are contaminating the air with high levels of dust particles.

In the global economy for heavy equipment, Colombia has established itself as a land rich with opportunity. With the passage of the U.S.-Colombia Trade Promotion Agreement, over $200 million in tariffs required by manufacturers in the past have been eliminated. And the country’s economy is growing at a rate that requires heavy investment in infrastructure in order to sustain itself.

To be more specific, the country's growth is expected to reach 4.3% by 2016 compared to 2.9% in Latin America as a whole. This kind of growth would not be possible without the construction sector which made a 21.3% increase between July and September of 2013; driven by a rise in agricultural production fueling the country’s export market.

Lowell Snow, ACTP’s resident mining expert with over 40 years of experience in heavy equipment, has said, “Managing a fleet of machines in mining requires a balancing act between time, cost, and quality.  Everyone from the equipment operators, mechanics, and purchasing managers have to work hand-in-hand with one another to anticipate problems that could lead to downtime.”

The three factors Lowell describes (time, cost, and quality) are all interconnected. Let’s take a closer look:

Time

Machine downtime on a mine site reduces productivity of the operation as a whole until the equipment is up and running again.  Whether it is planned maintenance or an unplanned breakdown, with the size and complexity of the equipment it can take days to perform even simple repairs. 

When a machine (i.e. a wheel loader) becomes inoperable, the operation will see a significant decrease in productivity (and revenue) until it is back scooping and loading product. Since revenue is being lost for every hour the machine is not operating, fleet managers must try to minimize the amount of time to fix the machine.