Excavator final drive motors come in a variety of different sizes and few are compatible between different makes and models of equipment. That makes them hard to keep track of, especially if you represent a growing organization that’s purchasing new gear on a regular basis. Despite what you might think, you don’t need a great deal of specialized software applications to maintain an inventory of the replacement motors you currently have in your supply barn.
Old school flat file databases are essentially just regular plain text documents written a certain way. Retailers have found them to be too inflexible for their inventory needs, which is why you don’t hear about them very often any longer. However, these should work quite well for an excavation or construction company that has to list how many replacement motors they have of each type and what kinds of final drive motor each of their gear takes. A simple cloud storage solution will make it possible to maintain this list from nearly anywhere. Use the information below as a guide for using software to maintain a final drive motor inventory.
Building a Simple Motor List
Upload a list of all your final drive motors to any online office system and you’ll be able to see it even if you’re looking at a phone or tablet in the field. Technicians who have to go out and repair excavators while they’re on a construction site will appreciate the ability to see exactly what kind of replacement part they need to get a machine moving again. Instead of having to scroll through a huge number of entries, they can rely on a single keyboard shortcut or search widget to find exactly what they’re looking for.
Some forward-thinking construction firms have actually issued each of their teams a laptop they can use to search through their databases when something goes wrong. By bookmarking the page of a trusted final drive motor vendor, they’ll even be able to make replacement orders without having to leave the job site. Companies that have found themselves under a long-term contract will probably be among the first to go this route.
Tracking Larger Equipment Inventories
While these solutions may work well for small- to medium-sized businesses, they’re not going to be very attractive to information technology staffers at bigger organizations. Sophisticated relational database structures are needed in those cases. They use a series of so-called binary trees that feature links between the various entries stored in a database to make searches move much more quickly. Text files and linear linked lists are very easy to work with, but they become slow when they’re loaded down with more than a few hundred entries.
Operating engineers who work for national construction concerns will usually deploy a relational database solution before even suggesting any other. Nevertheless, online cloud storage systems still enable managers to connect such a database to the web regardless of how complicated it might be. Individual staffers would only have to download a mobile app to work with these databases while they’re taking care of business out at the worksite.