Equipment World Digital Magazine
Issue link: http://read.dmtmag.com/i/816123
F irst the headquarters move out of Peoria, and now this. With the unveiling of its 745 articulated truck in March, Cat quietly moved to a new nomenclature system. The details are on page 11, but in a nutshell, Cat found itself running out of letters, the no- menclature it has used for decades to indicate new generations of machines. The company only considers 15 letters as usable (one ex- ample of why: the difficulty of distinguishing a "U" or a "V" from a distance). The key word here is "usable," despite the snarky "doesn't Cat know there are 26 letters of the alphabet?" comments we got on Facebook when we broke this story on our website. In Cat's view, the letter "T," which has been on its high-drive dozers since 2006, is the last usable letter. What to do? Cat's solution: Drop the letter. Going forward, there will be no generational marking on the side of a Cat machine. And so Cat's new 745 articulated truck, which would have been a 745D under the former system, is now simply a 745. As product lines come up for their next generational update, they, too, will be converted to the no-letter nomencla- ture (with the exception of dozers; again, see details on page 11). This, Cat says, gives them a future-proof naming system. Cat will now use what it's calling a Build Number to indicate machine generations. The current 745, for example, is a fourth-genera- tion machine, and so would be indicated by "745 (Build 04)" in internal and external com- munications. But you will not see this Build Number in the model name on the side of the machine. Such a dramatic change in what has been a longstanding practice is bound to feel… shall we say, different. Ed Stembridge with Cat, who briefed me on the details of the change, has seen this feeling played out in the company. As one of the people who is explaining the new nomenclature system internally at Cat, Stembridge says he's seen people "go through the five stages of grief" over the switch. I know what he means. In fact, I was ready to moan over the demise of the letter system, when it hit me: Komatsu doesn't put that gen- erational dash on its machines. Neither do the many other manufacturers (Hitachi, Doosan, Kobelco, etc.) that follow a similar "dash-gen- erational number" naming system. Cat's Build Number would be in parenthesis instead of preceded by a dash, but it's basically the same pattern. But that logical thinking doesn't take away the fact that we're used to quickly determin- ing the generation of a Cat machine by look- ing at its side. And while it's true that some generational changes may mean a dramatic shift in a machine's look, that's not always the case. I've sat through many press brief- ings (including Cat's) where presenters have said, "It's not obvious from the outside, but we've made dramatic changes to this ma- chine." That means that external changes, beyond new paint and body tweaks, may not present the same at-a-glance differentiator the former letter system did. And, dang it, it's just going to feel awkward to write "the 745 (Build 05) replaces the 745 (Build 04)." Maybe in about two years' time I'll get used to saying "Deerfield, Illinois-based Caterpil- lar." And maybe by then writing about Build 07 and comparing it with Build 06 will feel natural. Maybe. EquipmentWorld.com | May 2017 9 on record | by Marcia Gruver Doyle MGruver@randallreilly.com A Cat by any other name