Heavy equipment is the group of large machines that move earth, rock and crops: excavators, haul trucks, tractors and combines. Every road or metro site in an Indian city has a yellow excavator digging at it. In a village, a tractor pulls a plough, and a combine harvests the wheat.
There are three kinds. Construction machines are excavators, which dig, dozers, which push earth, and cranes and lifting platforms, which raise people and loads. Mining machines are haul trucks, some as large as a house, which carry rock out of a mine. Farm machines are tractors, which pull and power other tools, and combines, which cut a crop and separate the grain in one pass. You will find them under construction equipment and agricultural machinery. Another group, ground support equipment (GSE), moves aircraft and baggage at airports.
The buyers are construction contractors, mining companies, farmers and rental companies. These machines cost lakhs or crores of rupees, so many buyers do not pay the full price at once. They finance the machine, or rent it for the length of one job, using lease management software. The makers usually sell through independent dealers, a model described under selling through partners. The dealers also service the machines and supply spare parts. A machine is used heavily for many years and wears out its parts. So spare parts and service give the maker and the dealer a steady income long after the sale, which is the idea of service after the sale.
The machines are now connected. Telematics means that each machine reports where it is, how many hours it has worked, how much fuel it has used and what faults it has. Software for machine control guides the blade of a dozer or the path of a tractor by GPS to within a few centimetres. Some machines now work with no driver at all, at the levels described in levels of autonomy.
The cost of a breakdown explains why this software sells. An excavator that stands idle holds up the whole construction schedule, and a tractor that fails in the sowing week can cost the farmer a season. So the dealer, who sees the faults early, can bring a part before the machine stops.
Take, for example, a machine dealer in Coimbatore who sells an excavator to a contractor. The dealer watches its fault reports and calls the contractor when a service is due.