To create more value for customers, Komatsu and Cummins have partnered to deliver a new, integrated remote equipment monitoring solution designed to, they say, reduce unplanned stoppages, accelerate maintenance execution, and extend component life and maintenance intervals.

By sharing equipment health and performance data over common infrastructure, and collaborating on health analytics, both companies can access the same secure data and develop joint analytics and insights. The partnership will see data collected on a single device and all actions are managed in a shared case management system, allowing experts from both teams to work remotely with a customer’s maintenance staff.

Integrating machine OEM support from Komatsu with expert OEM engine insight from Cummins allows both to proactively monitor asset health and optimise maintenance management, they say, designed to help mining customers:

• Avoid unplanned maintenance;
• Predict maintenance needs;
• Decrease production costs and downtime from maintenance; and
• Increase asset utilisation.

In the past, equipment and engine data collection and generation involved multiple data logging devices, each with their own individual remote data connection. Customers typically had separate devices which created separate data silos for subsystems on a single haul truck.

“With multiple data flows, mines have less control over where the data goes and who has access, whereas a single piece of hardware can simplify data flow and may also enhance cybersecurity,” the companies said. “By removing the need for duplicative communication infrastructure and multiple points of connection, the Cummins and Komatsu solution can offer new insights to help mining managers make better decisions faster.”

Less hardware also reduces maintenance time and machine downtime as there is less hardware to install, and there are fewer components to maintain.

This combined solution is designed to improve asset protection and reduce harm to fleets, to give customers a simplified and improved experience for asset health case management, onboarding and analytics. Instead of subscribing to separate solutions from Komatsu and Cummins, this new solution offers mines a more cost-effective approach to monitoring, the companies claim.

“With this partnership, we are tying two high-value services together,” Greg Lanz, General Manager, Technology Interoperability for Komatsu, said. “By combining data analytics from both Komatsu and Cummins, we can collaborate to help our customers maximise total asset performance and health.”

Dana Miller, Director and Service Solutions for Cummins, said: “Our aim with this integrated solution is to deliver a robust best-in-class solution to help our customers succeed.”

Effective asset management solutions don’t just provide more data about a site’s equipment and engines, they help ensure data is useful and organised so stakeholders can be more proactive. For example, understanding where a truck is in the mine, what its payload is, and which operator is driving it, all provide useful context to analyse why the engine is behaving a particular way. By combining engine and non-engine data, mining customers will be able to see all of their equipment data in one place, with insights and recommendations for a holistic view of the machine.

Lanz added: “The collaboration between Cummins and Komatsu on broader data sets opens opportunities for us to build more complex analytics and insights. The secret sauce is combining the expertise of both teams.”