The Parker Bay Company

The Database comes at the machine listings from two separate directions: input from the manufacturers when they ship machines, and input from the mines as it appears in the field at any point in time. Fundamentally, we’re talking about the same units but there are imperfections in the reporting. As you’re aware, each manufacturers is required to report shipments quarterly to include essential identifiers (model and serial number) and destination. But only for mining applications. Generally for the models covered by the Database, all units of a given model go to mining but occasionally not the case (e.g., a Cat 992 to a big construction project). So for all mining applications shipments are recorded and will have a ship date included. But…

When Parker Bay gathers data from mines to get their current machine fleet (as well as securing it from parent companies and reliable third-party sources), we check it against all reported past shipments. If units show up at a mine that weren’t in some previous manufacturer’s shipment report, we check with the manufacturer to find out why. There are any number of possible answers, but the two most common are: that it’s a very old machine that pre-dates the original shipments history obtained from the manufacturers when data gathering began in 1997; or it was moved to that mine from somewhere else.

It’s also possible that a machine was incorrectly ascribed by the manufacturer as being delivered to a non-mining application when in fact it went to the mine where we ‘found’ it. We can’t say how often this happens but occasionally we get the serial number and upon follow up, find that to be the case. There doesn’t seem to bee any issue of intentional under-reporting, just limitations to the data-recording process. As you know, a number of OEM’s work through dealers and get much of their information on the end-users/mines from the dealers. Some times the transmittal of these details from dealer to manufacturer to Parker Bay is incomplete or inaccurate. We’re constantly working on some of these ‘issues’ so as to improve the accuracy and completeness received in the quarterly shipments reports.

The database includes machines relocated/purchased second-hand to the extent that these are known. The “SHIPALT” field in the Machine List table can be filtered for “relocated” to indicate those machines that were brought to that site second-hand. There are more than 2,200 machines so designated (out of 50,000+ active units in total). However, in some instances units may have been moved, then identified at a new mine but not confirmed as second-hand.

The database permits users to determine the machine population that was active for a previous calendar year. It is the sum of the active machines (“A” in the A/I field) with ship dates of that calendar year and before plus the inactive machines (“I” in the A/I field) also shipped that year or prior that have status dates after the year in question. The latter adds back into the population those machines that were active that year, but are currently in the database as inactive, having been removed from the population since then. Using 12/31/2005 as an example, such a query would be [Status="A", Ship Yr= <2006] plus [Status="I", Ship Yr= <2006, Status Date= >#1/1/2006#].