Together the two will develop a way for customers to make sense of the masses of information flowing from their trucks, shovels and dozers. This way they can catch potential problems early and possibly save themselves a lot of money – both in repair costs and downtime.

Uptake provides a dynamic analytics and insight platform for a wide array of industries.

“Customers use our current technology for fleet monitoring and to track fuel efficiency, idle times, location and more,” Caterpillar chairman and CEO Doug Oberhelman said.

“Our existing solutions are effective but it’s time we take it to the next level.”

Oberhelman said together the two companies would be able to turn “the quintillion bytes of incoming data we see every day” into useful information Cat customers could use for quick decisions and for planning purposes.

“Through this agreement we’ll build a platform to bring the next generation of our technology services and products to market sooner and will act as a springboard for years of development after that,” he said.

“We want to empower our customers with the insight necessary to shift from a reactive ‘repair after failure’ mode to a proactive ‘repair before failure’ stance.

“The end result will be more efficient operations and increased fleet availability for our customers.”

Since 2014, Uptake has been developing locomotive-related predictive diagnostics and fleet optimise solutions for Caterpillar subsidiary Electro-Motive Diesel.

The successes from the locomotive project led Caterpillar to upsize its Uptake relationship.

Uptake cofounder and CEO Brad Keywell said this was a unique time in history when analytics were enabling insights that were changing the way entire industries worked.

“Our platform takes massive data provided by sensors, combines it with data science to understand signals and patterns and deploys insights in real time that save money, optimise performance and prevent unplanned downtime,” Keywell said.

“Our partnership with Caterpillar has resulted in a cross-industry platform that is informed by the best data and the best operational insights.”

In the coming months Caterpillar will work with its Cat dealer network and Uptake to roll out the latest predictive analytics and insights through web-based and mobile tools for customers.