In January this year I set out to test the concept of crowd sourcing equipment benchmark data. We are now one month on from the initial survey responses and it is worth sharing the results so far.

Thank you to the 85 participants that have entered data so far. If you haven’t done the survey yet, it is not too late to join the experiment. Just follow this link Click Here For The Survey, if there are questions you can’t answer then please skip them to complete the survey.

The good news is that 100% of the people who did the survey knew which brand of equipment they have with Caterpillar coming out on top with the most number of excavators.

Around 80% of participants provided their model type with the most common excavators being the Liebherr 996, Hitachi EX3600 and Komatsu PC8000.

From here the data starts to become more challenging with only 30% of participants entering their productivity data after most dropped out before answering the bucket size and material density questions. I must admit this was a little surprising as I was expecting most participants to know this basic information about their diggers and material properties.

As a results so far there are 3 excavator model types with enough data to start to be statistically relevant. These are the Hitachi EX3600, Komatsu PC1250 and the Komatsu PC8000. The max, min and average productivity can be seen in this graph.

While the jury is still out on overall accuracy of some of the data, I think concept of crowd sourcing benchmark data is one that can work. The challenge may be more around the complexity of the data set being collected and how to ensure accuracy of the result. I will give another update once we have another months worth of data in hand.

Please share this post as the more that participate the better the data will be.

Written by Simon Cohn (Managing Director)