LOAD & HAUL
CLOUD-BASED PROGRAM
OFFERS MORE PRODUCTIVITY ON-SITE
An earthmoving OEM’s telematics and machine data system has made its mark on the global quarrying landscape, and is being increasingly taken up in Australia. Caterpillar’s Kit Kyarsgaard tells Quarry all about Cat Productivity.
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o matter the profession, work is about achieving results – and improvements. Even if a task is satisfactorily completed, there is scope to review and determine how it can be bettered. A holistic view of an organisation will encompass multiple tasks, some which may be related or integrate. How effectively do these tasks affect the organisation’s productivity? And what can be done to improve their functionality and outcomes to wholly benefit it? Kit Kyarsgaard has spent the best part of 21 years with global earthmoving original equipment manufacturer (OEM) Caterpillar – and has pondered some of these questions more specifically for quarrying operations in a variety of roles. Indeed, more than two decades with the same company has enabled him to better understand the needs and wants of aggregate businesses the world over. When Kyarsgaard started his career for Caterpillar in Peoria, Illinois, USA in 2000, little did he know he was embarking on a journey that would see him work in marketing and sales representative roles for Caterpillar’s northwest region (Alaska, Idaho, Washington, Montana and Oregon) and Texas and Louisiana in the rebuilding period after the devastating impact
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of Hurricane Katrina. He spent time as a Cat system applications analyst in Houston, Texas which he said helped him develop a solid understanding of Caterpillar’s customers, eg “Understanding how they use our products, helping them to justify the right fleet or right systems approach, how to move equipment more efficiently, drive and show them value, and understand from our customers how they make money. What do they do with our products to drive and increase their bottom lines?” From 2011, Kyarsgaard was the regional products application specialist for excavators, based in Singapore, where he covered South East Asia, India and Australia. “That was an awesome experience, I learned a lot about the different regions and territories,” he told Quarry. “In the Asia-Pacific region, operations are powered by the costs per hour or costs per tonne, and in Australia the cost of the job justifies the efficiencies. It was interesting to learn about the life cycle value and performance of customers, to understand their thoughts.” Kyarsgaard was subsequently elevated to the position of global products applications specialist for medium-sized excavators from the Cat 320 up to the 335, bringing
voice of customer (VOC) perspectives into the engineering team to develop the next generation excavator. After nearly a decade in Singapore, Kyarsgaard returned to Peoria to commence his current role as global product marketing consultant for Cat Productivity. He described the role as “taking all the advantages of the technology that we have on our latest products, and thinking about how we can make it useful for our customers, increase their bottom lines and decrease the inefficiencies on the job site to help them make more profits”.
WHAT IS CAT PRODUCTIVITY? Cat Productivity is a cloud-based program that captures quarries’ GPS and telematics data about detailed production measurements and job site data via Cat Product Link devices fitted to Caterpillar or mixed fleet machines. Figures from a given site are transmitted via digital phone connection to the cloud and they can be downloaded in the form of payload and cycle segmentation data by quarry producers for analysis and customer insights. “Imagine you have a quarry,” Kyarsgaard said. “You want to know how many loads are being produced, which loader filled which
