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Contractor Roundtable Highlights
Maintenance Concerns - Room for Improvement
 One major area contractors would like more assistance from equipment makers is maintenance - both preventive and incident-specific - according to the Contractor Roundtable participants.
Neal Ferry, Corporate Equipment Manager for contractor Peter Kiewit Sons', Inc., said clear definitions and guidelines for rebuilding equipment, either based on hours of use or gallons of fuel, would be helpful.
Contractors would like "anything that equipment makers can pass on to us that tells us when it's best to overhaul that component before it fails," according to Ferry.
Exaggerated Claims
To some degree, equipment makers are trying to outsell each other with their claims of equipment lifespan, Bechtel's Hall said. Rather than exaggerated statements, many users would prefer to know how many hours of life they can expect from a component before it fails, he noted.
Adds Hall, "On the mining side of the business, a lot of the users have probably developed more empirical evidence as to when something needs to be rebuilt than the manufacturers will profess to. In some cases, they can tell the manufacturers better than the manufacturers can tell them."
While he agrees that data on mean time between failure would be useful, Chris Ryan, Vice President of Equipment for Boh Brothers Construction Co., said different data would be needed for different equipment applications, such as mining versus general construction. Factors such as consistent operations, environments and management would also affect failure data.
Equipment Lifecycle Data
Charles Snyder, a senior executive with Fluor Global Services, believes there's a great opportunity for a company to partner with manufacturers and consolidate equipment lifecycle data.
"There would be a tremendous opportunity for market analysis firms to consolidate the data and then give us data back that helps us manage our fleets better and helps us predict failure better," he said.
Parts Delivery Delays
Partnerships and data sharing would also help contractors solve their parts problems, according to roundtable participants. Although 48 hours is an acceptable delivery time for perhaps 80% of parts, that's too long a wait for some remote projects with larger equipment, said Kiewit's Ferry. That's because with large equipment, installation time can add to the length of construction delays.
These types of delays could be avoided with some proactive effort on the part of dealers and manufacturers, Ferry said. "We'd like dealers to come to our projects and find out what our applications are and work with our people to put the right parts on the shelf, " he said. "Then once they've put the parts on the shelf, they should be refilled at the local level. With certain parts, they should continually reorder until the project is over."
>>Go to: Training: Room for improvement in key product support component
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