New equipment is on its way Although no new machines were launched at the event, Paolo presented a slide with 47 new product advances, which are set to come into the UK market throughout 2016. Headline announcements included new Cat D6 dozers featuring Cat Grade with Slope Assist and 3D, new Cat 323F excavator featuring Cat Grade with Assist, a range of new M Series wheel loaders and new D Series telehandlers.


Paolo also made a further announcement relevant to the UK market, that will see inboard wet brakes, replacing the current disk brakes used on the Cat 725C2 and Cat 730C2 Articulated Trucks, that are built in the Peterlee factory.


Fuel in the firing line With a staggering 400,000 Caterpillar units now connected across the globe, the announcement that VisionLink™ monitoring, which is already a UK standard, will now also come as standard on medium to large product lines, showed just how important connected technology will become in the future.


For Paolo this technology will be key to improving customer performance and in particular reducing fuel consumption: “On average fuel now accounts for 30% of customer operating costs, so we are really focused on fuel efficiency management. Through a combination of technological advances on machines and software solutions that help to monitor the performance of equipment, we can now clearly show customers where fuel savings can be achieved, machine by machine. So what we are talking about is a continually growing suite


of equipment management solutions that fall under our new EMSolutions brand that will be delivered by experts at Finning, who will analyse and advise how UK and Ireland customer equipment and fleets are performing.”


Integrating technology ‘On the Iron’


and onsite When it came to product related solutions, there were major announcements and demonstrations of new grade technology for excavators and dozers, in addition to payload monitoring for articulated trucks, wheel loaders and excavators. Cat Production Management (CPM) has now also been launched on all articulated trucks. Paolo also demonstrated how technology could combine to improve jobsite productivity, comparing a section of a road job using traditional methods, against the same project using a combination of different technology enabled equipment.


“On this test alone we were able to reduce man hours by 31%, cut equipment hours by 34%, whilst using 46% fewer hours to complete the project. Obviously these figures equate to some serious productivity gains and in terms of fuel, we recorded a 37% saving in the number of litres used, which is huge.”


To bring the technology to life, our Finning News camera crew were there to find out more, with exclusive interviews carried out with Caterpillar experts and live demonstrations, which are available to view online at www.Finningnews.com by searching Caterpillar press launch overview 2016.


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