Page 47 - Peterson 85 Years and Going Strong

partment doesn’t understand exactly what we do,” says Harden, who averages eighty hours a week— rain,shine,or otherwise.“To be honest,a lot of peo- ple in the office don’t have a clue what we do out in the field. We’re working three to four hours away from the shop, and if that laptop doesn’t work, we can’t fix the tractor. It’s no longer just about pull- ing a wrench. You have to be computer savvy. It’s a completely different era from twenty-five years ago. If you took somebody that was awesome back in the 1980s and 90s and put them on one of these new machines today, they wouldn’t know what to do. Some of these machines have anywhere from four computers onboard to fourteen with the new D7E electric drive. It’s crazy.”
Collaboration between IT and Peterson’s service technicians has yielded several benefits. In 2015, IT created a new arm of the Help Desk—the IT Service Group—dedicated to Peterson’s 600 techs. “Our job is to find different ways to save the tech- nicians time and help them so they don’t have to worry about computer problems,” says Alex Diaz,
HOW CATERPILLAR’S ET WORKS
Travis Hetrick, San Leandro Field Service
“The first thing you do when you get to a machine is hook up your computer into the console in the cab. Then you retrieve any logged information—codes that are active or present. And then you do a product status report—basically a download of the whole history of the machine from the last time someone connected to it until now. The ECM [Electronic Control Module, or computer] has all the fault codes, lifetime of fuel burned, lifetime history—everything. So if you end up losing data on your laptop, the machine’s ECM has all that valuable information stored in it. And then if you need to, you can send it to a TC [Tech- nical Communicator] so they can understand what you’re working on and what you’re up against. For
a younger guy like me, in my thirties, working with computers isn’t a bad thing because we grew up with them. It’s like playing video games, in a sense. You’re basically troubleshooting and fixing machines straight through your computer without having to get greasy. It’s pretty advanced.”
Alex Diaz, IT Service Area Manager
“Once you plug into the tractor using a Comm Adapter III, you can read all the ECMs, which gives you all the fault codes. Peterson Trucks technicians use a different adapter—a Nexiq USB Adapter II. They track down issues in the same way. For example, say you have an eighteen-wheeler with a backlight out. In the old days, you’d have to trace that wire con- nection from the cab all the way back to the bumper. Today, you plug in your laptop and the program tells you exactly which light is the problem. It’s a whole different world now.”
Alex Diaz/IT Service Area manager
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