Page 270 - Peterson 85 Years and Going Strong

CORE VALUE: CUSTOMER FIRST
ON THE JOB WITH FRED AND WILMA (2019)
Meeting a tough challenge with creativity, determination, and a sense of humor often wins the day. And the customer. That’s exactly what happened with the SITECH team in Paradise, CA, with Cat’s new payload scale technology. The November 2018 Camp Fire devastated the town and Argonaut was one of the contractors working on the cleanup. They bought fifteen new Cat Next Gen excavators for the Camp Fire cleanup, each equipped with the Cat® PayLoad system. Within the first month, design glitches started to show. “New technology always has kinks to work out, on top of a learning curve for operators,” says Chris Mata, SITECH salesman, who worked closely with Argonaut. “Customers expect the scales to be within 1–3 percent accuracy, and the Cat scales just fell short, initially.”
Argonaut also had eight Cat 325 excavators wired with Trimble’s after-market LOADRITE system, each working within the 1–3 percent accuracy window. “We compared every single truck going to the CHP scales loaded with the Trimble gear. They all came back between 15.7 and 16 tons. Right on the money,” says Mata.
Since Argonaut had both Cat and Trimble systems working in the same vicinity, they had front row seats to a side-by-side comparison. “They could see the pros and cons of each,” says Mata. “And the inefficiencies. Due to the scope of the project, if the scale is off even 5 percent, and you’re loading an extra fifteen trucks a day, that’s a lot of underweight or overweight loads running to the landfill. The inefficiencies add up. It was a real eye-opener.”
Left to right: Argonaut crew on fire clean up in Paradise, California; SITECH’s Chris Mata with the original Fred
268 | PETERSON: 85 YEARS AND GOING STRONG