Barloworld Equipment is always planning ahead to ensure they can deliver effective, value-added solutions to their customers.
EQUIPPING AFRICA
Barloworld Equipment is a wholly owned subsidiary of Barloworld Limited, a multinational brand distribution company that is listed on the Johannesburg stock exchange. The company operate as the sole dealer for Caterpillar Inc. (CAT) earthmoving machines, power systems and related mining and construction equipment in all its African territories. This consists of South Africa, Lesotho, Swaziland, Namibia, Botswana, Angola, Malawi, Mozambique, Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo’s Katanga Province. The company also represents rotary blasthole drilling equipment from Atlas Copco, Metso Minerals Mobile Mining, Construction Crushing, Screening Plants, MAK and Perkins Diesel Engines.
STRATEGIC PLANNING AND IMPROVEMENTS
The company’s strategic planning looks ahead to the future of their customer business. This allows Barloworld Equipment to anchor effective, value-adding solutions to a client’s equipment procurement and management needs. The Barloworld Equipment Centre of Excellence at Isando, Gauteng, is the hub from which the company’s earthmoving equipment solutions strategy is driven. A second location in Boksburg, Gauteng, serves the same purpose for the power division of the business.
Barloworld Equipment runs a continuous process improvement programme, based on Lean 6 Sigma, which aims to give the customer what they want, when they want it and at the right cost. The programme has improved and continues to improve Barloworld Equipment’s effectiveness in key areas. As part of 6 Sigma, a ‘War on Waste’ campaignaims to reduce the amount of wasted costs that are produced in mining related day-to-day activities. The campaign has captured the imagination of many employees and resulted in significant savings across the business.
EARTH MOVING FUNDAMENTALS
Barloworld are very focussed on local skills development for the benefit of customer employees who are operators to site supervisors, as well as senior engineers. Barloworld Equipment’s applications and training experts aim to spend their time where it counts most; on customer sites, where they can assist your employees in achieving optimum equipment usage through a combination of correct site layout, application of the machines to the relevant jobs, and correct operating procedures. This helps to advise on how haul road gradients affect production, bucket design, size, cycle times and tyre choice; of which the company often bring in international Caterpillar experts to help perfect operating techniques.
MARKET LEADER VISION
Barloworld Equipment is committed to providing quality construction and mining equipment to the earthmoving industry by developing globally competitive, diverse, empowered and passionate people alongside the delivery of a quality product range. Further, the company provide mining and construction equipment management services, coupled with cost-effective solutions. The company strive to be the market leader by providing customers with the lowest total owning and operating cost over the life of construction and mining machinery.
The Group provides customers with two interlinked services designed specifically to positively impact four key factors: improving fleet and machine productivity and availability, lowering operating costs and improving utilisation. These are daily factors of consideration when owning earthmoving equipment and machinery.
The Professional Services Group works on the premise that lowest cost per cubic metre or ton = lowest possible hourly costs divided by the highest possible hourly productivity. A low machine retail price can be wiped out in a few months if the productivity of the machine is not optimised.
SAFETY
Health and Safety is an essential core value that runs throughout Barloworld Equipment’s practices. “The health, safety and well-being of our employees is of the utmost importance and as a company, we will continually work to ensure all employees also regard this as an essential core value.”
The belief at Barloworld Equipment is that cooperation of all employees is essential in achieving a high standard of accident prevention. The company empower their staff to continually improve and spread the safety message by ensuring they themselves work safely and in accordance with the company’s safety procedure requirements and legislative requirements. Consequently, a division of Caterpillar called Customer Safety Services, has created safety.cat.com to provide Barloworld’s customers and employees with information spanning the entire Cat product line, promoting safety in all areas of the business.
WHAT SETS THEM APART
Designed to keep pace with your business requirements, Barloworld Equipment has developed a suite of flexible ownership and/ or rental options to ensure that clients always have the optimum mechanises solutions. In addition to new equipment sales, Barloworld Equipment’s CAT Certified Used programme caters for customers in the market for low hour machines backed by a comprehensive Caterpillar warranty. CAT Certified Used (CCU) is a low hour CAT Earthmoving Equipment sourced exclusively from Barloworld Equipment’s rental fleet and sold with a 12-month warranty. The benefits are cost savings, conformity to strict Caterpillar standards and immediate availability.
The CCU brand makes CAT machines accessible to many smaller and emerging businesses that need Caterpillar reliability and quality but do not have sufficient capital to invest in new CAT machines. Because CCU machines conform to strict technical requirements, their overall health is guaranteed and hence they are safer to operate and less likely to need costly after sales support than most used machines available in the market.
The Barloworld Equipment CAT Rental Store is the industry leader in the rental of large construction equipment and mining machinery, as well as below 20-ton general construction machines for building sites, landscaping and other smaller applications. A comprehensive range of compressors are also available for rental. All repairs and maintenance of rental units are carried out by Barloworld Equipment’s trained service technicians in the workshop or in the field.
