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Remote monitoring system helps recover excavator

The thieves demonstrated new levels of boldness in the recent attempt to steal an eight-tonne Komatsu PC88MR-8 excavator.

When plant and operations manager Michael Bellino and his crew finished work at a Seven Hills building site on a Friday afternoon, they secured the machine and the site for the weekend before cleaning up and heading home.

Evidently watching the machine over the weekend, the thieves seized their moment on a quiet Sunday night, breaking in and loading the excavator onto the back of a truck.

When Bellino arrived on Monday morning, something was clearly amiss.

“You definitely notice when a big yellow excavator is missing from a building site,” he said. “I had trouble believing it was gone when I first turned up.

“We use the excavator every day, it is essential to our daily operations. Every moment that the equipment is not working it is costing us money.”

Bellino immediately phoned the police and his Komatsu account manager Matt Watton, who referred the case to the KOMTRAX team.

KOMTRAX monitors equipment day and night, with remote monitoring, geofencing and travel alarms designed to detect theft and expedite recovery for Komatsu customers.

After reviewing the logs from recent communications with the excavator’s monitoring system, the KOMTRAX team found a 7:30pm scan showing the excavator to be exactly where it was supposed to be.

The next scan, at 8:20pm, showed the machine in a different location, about half an hour’s drive away.

Later that day the excavator was recovered, dusted for fingerprints by the police and returned to its owners.

In their short time with the machine, the criminals had filed off the serial numbers.

Bellino believed the thieves’ intention was to quickly resell it, either domestically or packed into a container and shipped to an overseas buyer.

“It’s the first time something like this has ever happened to me but you never know when it could happen again,” he said.

With recovery of non-tracking equipped utility equipment thefts very low, and the loss of a machine a major setback for operators, KOMTRAX ensures no machine goes unaccounted for.

“I was worried, as we depend on our machines, but we got the excavator back the same day and we got back to work – in the end we didn’t lose more than a few hours’ time,” Bellino said. “I rate KOMTRAX 100 per cent.

“The confidence of knowing we will never be down a machine gives me the peace of mind that helps us to grow our business.”


Source: Komatsu Australia

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