With Cat® Product Link™, Equipment Manager Finds He Can Be Everywhere at Once

When you’re a one-man equipment management crew, with operations spread as far apart as an eight-hour drive, sometimes you need a little assistance. For Dominik Mendoza, equipment manager for New Mexico-based McVay Drilling, help came in the form of Cat® Product LinkTM.

“I need to be able to look at everything in one place,” Mendoza says. “I’m one person—I can’t be everywhere at once, and it’s too costly to send a service technician after every possible problem.”

Instead, he uses Product Link, Caterpillar’s remote monitoring fleet management solution, to keep an eye on his company’s gas drilling rigs—all of which are powered by Cat engines—and Cat generator sets.

“I can look online and watch the engines,” Mendoza says. “It shows me on a map exactly where they are and how they’re performing.”

More important, Product Link delivers a warning whenever there’s a potential problem. That’s because Mendoza’s sales representative at Cat dealer Wagner Equipment set up the system to send him email and text alerts.

“If a rig is losing fuel pressure, I know about it before the operators notice,” he says. “I can alert them to the problem and have them perform a simple fix.”

That not only saves McVay Drilling the cost of downtime, but also the expense of sending dealer service technicians to what can be fairly remote locations in southeastern New Mexico and west Texas.

Recently, Mendoza received a text alert at 2am, warning him of low coolant levels on one of McVay’s biggest rigs. He was able to call the team on site, diagnose the problem and fix what turned out to be a leaking hose before the rig lost power. Another time, he was alerted to low fuel pressure on three gen sets at the same location. It turned out the valves hadn’t been reopened after fuel delivery—a problem Mendoza was able to identify and fix before the fuel delivery person even left the site.

“Product Link catches things fast, and it’s really easy to use,” Mendoza says. “It practically runs itself.”

Currently, McVay Drilling has activated Product Link on six of its Cat engines and gen sets, and Mendoza hopes to get it up and running on the others soon.

“It makes my job easier, and it gives our company peace of mind,” he say