Caterpillar: The Next Leap Manufacturer Providing a Sustainable Future with Cutting-Edge Technologies

When people hear Caterpillar, they think of big engines and even bigger machines. Caterpillar Inc. is the world's leading manufacturer of construction and mining equipment, diesel and natural gas engines, industrial gas turbines, and diesel-electric locomotives. The company's products can be seen at unique places like cruise ship/yacht engines, submarine engines, locomotives, and backup power generators (used at hospitals, concerts, sporting events, data centers).

Caterpillar has the largest global presence in the industries it serves with an unparalleled dealer network of 161dealers serving 192 countries. The company has more than 95years of engineering know-how and hands-on experience from some of the most challenging projects to provide their customers with the best products and services. Digital is the next step in that journey. With the latest advances in technology, the company is enhancing the value customers experience from Cat products. Caterpillar is doing many things in the digital space, from machine applications to online parts ordering and servicing needs.

Digital is how Caterpillar is improving the value that customers receive from the company's world-class yellow iron, expanding how customers interact with Cat machines, dealers, and the company.

Employees working at Caterpillar Inc. have the opportunity to build their careers on a global scale and take advantage of development opportunities to work with emerging technologies like AI, autonomous vehicles, telematics, robotics, and predictive analytics. Caterpillar has created an inclusive environment for its employees to explore their passions, make an impact and do the work that matters. From giving advanced visibility into the health of a mining truck running far underground or helping the small business owner find rental equipment at the click of the button to generating innovative solutions from millions of data points from millions of assets, the digital role at Caterpillar is more exciting than just creating another app. It is about connecting the physical machine with a digital experience for customers whose reputation and income are on the line with each project.

Fostering Unmatched Services to Establish a Digital Ecosystem

Since 1925, Caterpillar has been driving sustainable progress and helping customers build a better world through innovative products and services.  Throughout the product life cycle, the company offers services that are built on cutting-edge technology and decades of product expertise, backed by Caterpillar's global dealer network. The company ensures that its products and services provide exceptional value to help its customers succeed.

Specifically, in the digital space, the company's Cat Digital model aims to provide simplicity, as it focuses on connecting the customers' fleets. It has bold goals to connect more new and existing Caterpillar assets, as well as entire fleets. The data generated comes into the platform, which is a core pillar of the model, to run advanced analytics, materialize services and transform data into business-changing applications. Unplanned downtime is not an option for its customers, so Caterpillar is working to not only detect failures but also to predict them before they even happen. The team focuses on making the equipment smarter over time to boost customer experiences on a global scale. The company knows its customers and its equipment and therefore is in the best position to bridge the gap between physical iron and the digital world.

A Game-Changing Leader

OgiRedzic is Chief Digital Officer and Vice President caterpillar Inc. He is responsible for Cat Digital, a division with more than 1,200 global employees, located in the United States, India, and Switzerland. He manages key components of the company's digital strategy including connectivity, enterprise data, and e-commerce platforms, analytics, and applications.

Prior to joining Caterpillar in 2018, Ogi led Renault-Nissan Alliance's connected car and mobility activities as Alliance Senior Vice President, Connected Vehicles and Mobility Services. He has more than 20 years of experience, including additional positions at Nokia, NAVTEQ, Motorola, PCTEL, and at wireless communication start-upcyberPIXIE.

Ogi holds a bachelor's degree in computer science from Northeastern Illinois University, a master's degree in computer science from the Illinois Institute of Technology, along another master's degree in business administration from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.

Uniquely Driven Tech Products at the Forefront

Autonomy and automation: Caterpillar has invested in autonomy for more than 30 years, resulting in the world's largest fleet of haul trucks (nearly 500) that have safely moved more than 3.8 billion tons. By partnering with customers at the site, Caterpillar helps them deliver more consistent results in operations. Autonomy and semi-autonomy are also having a profound effect on safety by removing operators from potentially hazardous conditions. It also helps customers manage labor challenges. Finding experienced talent in remote application areas is often a challenge; remote control applications allow machines to be operated from afar, leading to upskilling of the workforce and creating employment opportunities for people who want to work but may face challenges in physically operating a machine.

Machine Learning: Machine learning also impacts a Caterpillarcustomer's journey a great deal. The analytics driving machine learning broadens the scope of wheel slip detection without additional expensive sensors. It does this by synthesizing data from more commonly available sensors. The value of such alerts may be significant. For example, one such alert to a mine site planner saved US$30,000 to US$50,000 in parts and labor and prevented about 48 hours of lost productivity. Caterpillar has increased its physics-based analytics models by three-fold since 2018. Caterpillar leverages collected data to develop proprietary machine learning models that can predict unplanned downtime for its machines or rebuild schedules for main components.

Benefits to Customers:  Caterpillar looks for digital solutions through a prism of a three-layer model in order to bring solutions that deliver benefits to its customers. It begins with the physical layer, working to fit all of its equipment with the best connectivity possible going forward, whether 4G cellular, satellite, WiFi or Bluetooth. Then there is the platform layer, where its system ingests data, processes it, and makes it available for consumption. Finally comes the application layer where the company builds applications for a particular segment or need. Throughout the process, machine learning technology is applied to improve products and services. The team is engaging with some of the best companies in the world to advance the company's machine learning capabilities and is making incredible progress. The systems can process large amounts of data in real-time to validate and improve the machine learning models quickly. This model which is supporting the company's solutions plays a key role in providing a modern digital experience to its customers.

Customers, Dealers, and Enterprises: The Lenses of Innovation

Caterpillar views innovation as a tool to improve business and how customers engage with the company and its dealers. The company looks for ways to apply digital technologies to existing opportunities including problems that could not be fixed without advances in technology. Then comes the goals of providing better customer experiences, a more effective supply chain or the ability to be smarter and faster. For Caterpillar, digital is an enabler and not a business in itself. It looks at innovation with three lenses. First is the customer lens, which focuses on finding ways to support the customers' operations as their needs change. The team strives to make it easier for the customers to interact with the company, learn about and shop for its products, and engage with its services. For instance, customers can manage their entire fleet in the Cat App or at My.Cat.Com, from ordering replacement parts to booking a service with a dealer. The second lens is dealers, which focuses on making it easier for dealers to engage with Caterpillar and to provide services to customers. The Caterpillar team has developed advanced condition monitoring tools so dealers can be informed about potential system issues on customer machines and engines. Dealers are also provided with tools to easily identify parts, even in the most complex assemblies, so they can quickly order replacements. Dealers are integral to creating a compelling and seamless customer experience in e-commerce. The third lens is the Caterpillar enterprise. Cat Digital's job is to make Caterpillar and its industries more successful in everything they do – from reducing costs and serving customers, to accelerating the time to market and building applications easily. As an example, the Cat Digital Analytics team might help the internal industry teams to find new insights from a field performance of a new product being launched.

A Garland of Awards and Achievements

Caterpillar's excellence has been recognized with several awards and accolades. In 2020, Caterpillar won the World's Most Admired Companies from Fortune magazine and achieved the 62nd position on the Fortune 500. It also won World and North America: Dow Jones Sustainability Index, Best-Managed Companies of 2020 and the World's Most Sustainably Managed Companies by The Wall Street Journal, and the Best Employers for Diversity in 2020 by Forbes, and garnered accolades from the Human Rights Campaign Foundation in the Corporate Equality Index category.

In the Cat Digital awards space, the division was recognized as #8 of the Top 100 Best Places to Work in Chicago in 2021 by BuiltIn Chicago and was also among the Top 20 Employer Brands in Chicago in 2019, recognized by Hired.com.

Shifting Tides: Envisioning an AI-Backed Future

Caterpillar is well-positioned to support its customers and innovate as their needs progress in this space. Customers will engage even more with Caterpillar through its digital tools and e-commerce services. Ogi believes that artificial intelligence will become an increasingly more important part of the company's products and services- and not just in autonomy and remote solutions. It will be vital to ensure that the company has the right part at the right place when the customer needs it, to help with servicing machines, and make it all cost-effective. "It focuses on ensuring the right digital foundation so the company can be just as successful, iconic, and remarkable in the next 100 years as it has been in the last 96," adds Ogi.

The Caterpillar team will ensure that assets are connected with the most appropriate technologies available and will continue to advance its consolidated digital platform, which is a trusted enterprise source for data and services. The team of more than 1,200 members has strong support from company executives, several global digital hubs, and many strong outside companies that are helping Caterpillarmove towards its goals. Over the years, the technique is working, and the company is no longer just being viewed as a world leader in iron, but as a company that produces the most intelligent, most connected iron in the world.