Cummins Helps Mines Avoid Expensive Downtime with Innovative Remote Monitoring

In mining, engine failures can cost owners up to $1 million per day. Still, busy drivers often ignore engine system warnings until it’s too late, and the truck engine fails completely.

To help mining customers increase uptime and profitability, Cummins Inc. offers an innovative maintenance service that remotely monitors customer truck engines as they operate in-field. The service’s internal diagnostics proactively monitors each engine’s fault information and live engine data, then sends alerts to customer support agents who triage the data and identify those alerts requiring immediate intervention. In this way, customers can learn about and fix potential issues before they have a chance to erupt into major problems.

But ensuring all “Immediate” alerts would be handled properly and promptly proved to be a challenge. Cummins customer support leaders had to find an accurate way to forecast exactly how many agents needed to be available to receive and disposition alerts at any given time.

The remote monitoring team at Cummins paired the cloud-based Calabrio Workforce Management (WFM) with the company’s existing Cisco phone system, then deployed the integrated forecasting solution across more than 450 agents in two countries to start.

Now, planners use Calabrio to build accurate, unique forecasting models for each new customer site based upon a variety of both historical and real-time criteria. They can even customise their Calabrio forecasts according to nuances for each site—such as the number of alerts typically received for the particular engine types used there; the number of older, more problematic engines used there; or the customers geographic location.

With Calabrio, Cummins leaders can accurately forecast incoming alerts, so agents can fulfill the promise made by the company’s innovative remote monitoring service. And the results are incredibly tangible.

Thanks to remote monitoring, one customer site was finally able to diagnose an issue with a specific engine family that had caused problems for three years. This feat—combined with the pinpointing of a problem that would have cost much more to repair if it had been allowed to reach the point of complete failure—created a massive, positive ripple effect: the customer saved $600,000 and recouped 150 hours of downtime. Overall, Cummins reduced response time to all customers by nine minutes and were able to add more customers sites to their monitoring program without having to add more staff.

Cummins’ remote monitoring service proved so successful, its team of agents will now remotely monitor all customer mine sites around the world—24 hours per day, seven days per week, 365 days per year.

Click here to read the entire case study.