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Machine Monitoring Systems
November 10th, 2007 by moresnow | Filed under Technology.Many construction manufacturers are starting to move down the path to create GPS / Diagnostic services which they are reselling with their equipment. Currently all the big players seem to offer this but outside of new OEM products there are limited offerings.It would be nice to see other manufacturers provide this. Could it be that not enough organizations have the capability or are there barriers for their entry.
Tags: Caterpillar, Gradall, JDLink, JLG, John Deere, Komatsu, Oshkosh
Hi James:
Various others in the industry have tried OEM’ing GPS tracking hardware into their machines with mixed success. The bottom line is that the hardware/software solution the manufacturers provide is typically quite a bit more expensive than 3rd party solutions…and the functionality is…well…what it is. Manufacturers are slow to improve their product and often assume it will be successful…just because.
Additionally, manufacturers are typically not “software and technology hardware sales people”. They don’t devote the RIGHT kind of resources to making the product successful. Again it goes back to “of course they’ll buy it…it’s green and says _ _ _ _ _ on it!
I’m deeply involved in the technology part of this business and its fascinating to watch it evolve.
I can’t agree more with you.
Look at the news on one of the Constuction Yellow and Black mfg’s site where they started a new dept to go after this. Insiders know that they have nobody with true mobile gps experience to build the killer app. In addition the user base running these machines and managing the teams running the machines are Playstation III, Tivo using users who want the rich interface with robust reporting and powerful functionality. They can’t deliver it.
They need to plug the resources working on some of the big projects at Web2.0 startups and the big geospatial tools. I
I have a design of an application which would solve these problems and believe the 3rd party groups will solve this much better than any of the big boys….