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4 rules for managing production dozer Owning & Operating

costs
Tom Jackson (/author/tjackson) | July 14, 2014

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Operator skill can have a big impact on the profitability of your dozing operations.

Of all the machines in the earthmoving world bulldozers, particularly large ones, may have the greatest variation when it comes to owning and operating
costs.

While the initial purchase price of a big dozer is a relatively fixed quantity, everything else from there can vary greatly. A backhoe owner o en charges by the
hour, but dozers are also evaluated by how much material they move tons or yards per hour. Instead of dollars per hour, dozer owners want to know tons per
dollar.

Back in 2008 we published this article on the owning and operating cost variables that relate to dozer operation. Machine prices and fuel costs have gone up
since then. And the switch from Tier 3 to Tier 4 Final engines has improved fuel economy a bit but the O&O impact of the emissions system overall has yet to
be validated in the field.

Your goal in good maintenance should be to increase uptime rather than trim costs.
But the basic principles and percentages have not changed much since 2008, which is why we think its worthwhile to revisit this set of equations.

Were concentrating on big dozers here, sometimes referred to as production dozers, such as Caterpillars D6 through D11. Smaller dozers, sometimes called
finish-grade dozers, have di erent applications and a di erent set of owning and operating conditions.
To get into the details of our original 2008 article, Caterpillar put together a team of experts for us including Chub Dietz, marketing/product consultant; Phil
Hansen, mining commercial manager; Tom Neeley, sales support manager for undercarriage marketing and Keith Heiar, tractor products marketing.

If there is an overall philosophy that this group holds to its that managing your owning and operating costs is best done through a strong relationship
between the manufacturer, the contractor and the dealer. Dozers of equal weight and horsepower can more or less push the same load, but to get the most
material moved per dollar you have to maximize productivity and minimize cost. Where there is value to be gainedmoney to be saved and productivity to be
enhancedis in working to spec the right machine for the job, making sure the operator is trained and in coordinating service and maintenance with your
dealer, Dietz says.

1. Undercarriages

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The chief value in good dozer maintenance is to avoid expensive downtime.

Picking the right undercarriage and good undercarriage maintenance are critical to achieving the lowest operating cost per hour, Neeley says. In an ideal
world all the undercarriage parts would wear out about the same time, but they dont. Pins and bushings go first (or need turning), typically followed by the
shoes and then the rollers and links. These could be replaced or refurbished in separate maintenance procedures, but most contractors dont want to pull the
machine out of the dirt so o en.

The catch is that every choice you make in specing an undercarriage is going to end up changing the operating costs and the amount of downtime. Theres no
one universal solution for everybody. For some it may make more financial sense to run their pins and bushings to destruction. Others may benefit from a
long-life pin and bushing assembly like Cats SystemOne. Either way, the choice of one component in your track will influence your choices for the rest of the
components. Every undercarriage needs to be custom designed, Neeley says, which is why Cat dealers o er what they call their Custom Track Service that
takes all these variables into account, runs them through a spreadsheet calculator that shows you what the di erent options do to your undercarriage
lifecycle and cost per hour.

2. Operators, productivity and fuel

Wages and diesel account for 75 percent of your operating costs for a D6T and 79 percent for a D11T. There is not much you can do about the price of either,
but there is plenty you can do to maximize the productivity and profit you get from these costs. Understand first, however, that typically fuel burned equals
work done. The more fuel youre burning, the more material youre moving, so high fuel consumption is not necessarily a bad thing, Hansen says.
By giving your operators advanced training in dozer techniques you can increase the amount of work they do without increasing what youre paying them. A
good operator spends less time blading air and more time moving dirt, Hansen says, and at the end of the day may produce 10 or 20 percent more work for
the same amount of wages and fuel expended. A well-trained operator will also take better care of the undercarriage and extend its life.

A good operator spends less time blading air and more time moving dirt.
Likewise a good cab and ergonomic controls boost productivity. Twenty years ago, a lot of contractors bought machines without cabs, Dietz says. But you
can look at the charts and see how important operator comfort is to productivity. Saving money on the cab is really penny wise and pound foolish.

Safety, as it relates to operators, technicians and any employee, is also a critical part of productivity and availability, Hansen says. Even a minor accident can
put a machine or a site out of operation for as much as a day. A history of accidents or safety incidents will drive up insurance costs, and drive away good
employees.

And dont forget about GPS. These machine control systems insure that you only move dirt once and maximize the return on your owning and operating costs
because they eliminate errors and rework.

3. Maintenance

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Soil moisture conditions can a ect the life of your undercarriage.

Other than the undercarriage considerations, its not worth a lot of e ort to try and substantially lower your maintenance costs beyond just following good
preventive maintenance practices. These on average turn out to be about 2 percent of your O&O costs on a D11 and 4 percent on a D6. So even if you cut
maintenance costs 20 percent, which would be very hard to do, youre still only gaining 20 percent of a small slice of the O&O cost pie. Your goal in good
maintenance should be to increase uptime rather than trim costs.

The best bang for the buck on big dozers comes from condition-based maintenance, Hansen says. But rather than push a component right up to the edge of
failure, you can take advantage of some of telematics monitoring systems to diagnose and alert you to a problem long before the machines performance or
components start to su er. These early warning systems not only save you from expensive catastrophic failure, they give you a bigger window of opportunity
to schedule the downtime and replacement machines.

In the sections below, well take a look at how all these variables come together.

Raining on profits
Raining on profits
Even something as innocuous as the amount of rain in a season can have a measurable impact on undercarriage life and lifecycle costs.

In the example below, two nearly identical Caterpillar D6Rs were run in nearly identical conditions (65 percent hard sand, soil pH of 7). The only di erence: the
amount of rain on the jobsites. The more moisture in the soil, the more the soil gets up, in and around the rollers, sprockets and moving parts of the
undercarriage; and the more wear it experiences. Just an extra inch of rain per month cuts undercarriage life by almost 25 percent and drives up the per-hour
costs accordingly.

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4. What a di erence 1 percent makes

Not all change is equal when it comes to helping increase profits. When you review your costs and operations to see how you might get a better return on your
dozer dollars, here are a few helpful facts from Caterpillar.

A one percent change in.

PRODUCTIVITY

can result in a 2.5 to 4.5 percent change in profit.

AVAILABILITY

can result in a 1.75 to 3.5 percent change in profit.

OPERATING COSTS

can result in a 1.5 to 3.5 change in profit.

UTILIZATION

can result in a 1.5 to 2.75 percent change in profit.

SELLING PRICE

can result in a 0.5 to 0.85 percent change in profit.

Cat D6T (2008)

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content/uploads/sites/91/2014/07/Screen-Shot-2014-07-14-at-8.32.41-AM.png)

Cat D11T (2008)

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content/uploads/sites/91/2014/07/Screen-Shot-2014-07-14-at-8.33.23-AM.png)

Additional tips on reducing dozer operating costs

Spec the correctly sized dozer for the job

Reduce packing material in the undercarriage
Avoid excess moisture on site
Maintain optimum track tension
Run the narrowest shoe width for conditions
Avoid high speed
Maintain machine balance equal ground pressure
Avoid traveling in reverse

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