The next 100 years was the headline theme of a fascinating Caterpillar customer panel discussion in front of a large number of international construction, quarrying, and mining equipment trade press at bauma 2025. Aggregates Business Editor GUY WOODFORD was among those in attendance.
In 2025, Caterpillar is marking its 100th anniversary year, and it was fitting that the world’s leading manufacturer of off-highway equipment had such a large presence at this year’s bauma, the world’s biggest exhibition showcase for construction, quarrying, mining and recycling equipment.
In addition to occupying 9,000 m² in Hall B6, more than any other indoor exhibitor, with its new and latest cutting-edge products and linked technology solutions, Caterpillar drew a large crowd to its Day 1 customer panel discussion at the International Congress Centre Messe München (ICM).
Tony Fassino, Group President of Caterpillar’s Construction Industries segment, and Herwig Peschl, Senior Vice President of Caterpillar’s Global Construction & Infrastructure, spoke briefly to set the scene before the main customer panel event, which they co-chaired.
“The last 100 years have been pretty interesting. My grandfather started working at Caterpillar when he was 20 years old; I’m fortunate enough to be here when Caterpillar turns 100 years old. We are built on a legacy of innovation, but more important is the next 100 years,” said Fassino.
“We had the product range for connected machines through satellite operations 30 years ago. Fast-forward to today, we’ve got well over a million machines communicating through VisionLink, allowing customers to manage their entire equipment fleet anywhere in the world. We have Cat Command now, yet over two decades ago, we had remote control machines, and about two decades ago, we had fully electric machines. A lot of the time, the industry isn’t quite ready to take it. From an R&D perspective, you’ve always got to be ready.”
Among Caterpillar’s quarrying-suited equipment launches at bauma 2025, held 7-13 April in Munich, Germany, were the new 65-tonne payload Cat 775 off-highway truck, engineered to enable fully autonomous capabilities in the future, and the Cat 395 FS (Front Shovel) large excavator, Caterpillar’s first Front Shovel configuration for 15 years.
“You will hear about the products, technologies and services that we are integrating to help our customers get the most out of their fleet and streamline their operations. You will see an immersive exhibit where our customers will see how we can help them with their most pressing problems,” said Peschl. “Over the last 20 years, we have invested over $30 billion in R&D in our products to help our customers get the most out of them, in terms of [lower] fuel burn and technologies. You will hear the impact of that today from some of our customers.”
Joining Fassino and Peschl on the ICM hall stage were Louis-Florent Sion, Lhoist’s Vice President Technical, Manufacturing & Supply Chain, Europe, Dorian Kunert, Lhoist’s mining operations manager, and EGGERS managing director Leif Nebel.
Founded in 1889 and headquartered in Belgium, Lhoist is a family-owned company and one of the world’s leading producers of lime, dolomite, and mineral solutions. Its products play a key role in daily society’s needs and are essential for various applications that support the future energy transition. Lhoist operates in over 25 countries, employing more than 6,650 people from over 70 nationalities. The company has over 135 sites and sells to customers in more than 80 countries across Europe, North America, Latin America, and the Asia-Pacific region.
“Much of our industry is run by multi-generational family businesses, where the children running the businesses today remember their parents or grandparents introducing them to the industry,” noted Fassino. “When you think about it, it’s a pretty small world from a construction perspective when you think of the work the likes of these gentlemen do. There’s nobody else who brings the freshwater that we all need, supplies materials to allow us to fertilise the land and produce food and does the mining for raw materials that build our schools, roads and bridges. These folks do that, and it’s a very important part of the story. These are the customers we serve.”
Speaking about Lhoist’s continuing investment in Cat machines and technologies, Louis-Florent Sion said: “Most of our applications are standard load and haul and then jaw crusher processing. Our two biggest challenges are safety and cost optimisation. When it comes to safety, we have been working on this for many years, focusing on staff training and wellness. We want to take this to the next level and trust that [Caterpillar] technologies are the solution.
“On cost optimisation, when you compare our quarry sites to the average quarry sites in Europe, ours are reasonably big, and at each site, we tend to extract half a million to one million tonnes a year. We aim to optimise costs based on facts and figures, and we look to Cat technologies to help us achieve this. They make access to key machine fleet performance data easier and more accessible for each of our quarry managers. It enables them to get the best out of their machines and operator teams.”
A major German company founded by Karl Eggers in Hamburg in 1907, EGGERS operates across a diverse range of business areas, including earthworks and civil engineering, demolition, environmental technology, explosive ordnance disposal, landfill construction, and road, sewer, and pipeline construction. Since 1991, Ralf Eggers, Karl’s great-grandson, has been the fourth generation to lead the steadily growing family business. Today, EGGERS employs over 800 dedicated employees from 16 nations.
Available for a wide range of next-generation Cat dozers, wheeled loaders and excavators, Cat Command remote control technology is reshaping quarry, construction and other industry job sites worldwide. In hazardous materials or unsafe conditions, remote control enables operators to stay at a safe distance from the machine and the dangers it poses. Operators can even work miles from the site itself, putting them even further from risk while maintaining total control and helping drive bottom-line benefits.
EGGERS’ managing director, Leif Nebel, said the company began exploring the use of remote control machine operation in 2017 to reduce work-site risk for its employees.
“We got an overview of different market solutions in this area, and we talked to Caterpillar about Cat Command, but at the time, it was only available in the U.S,” Nebel explained. “We together started to think about how we could bring it to the European region, and we were able to do that. It solves numerous problems for us in the highly regulated German market, which has a big focus on safety, as we do as a company.”
Lhoist’s Dorian Kunert brought a mining perspective to the conversation around the use of Caterpillar work-site technologies. “Technology implementation can sometimes be challenging, so I see four major ingredients to help overcome that. Firstly, you need very good project preparation. You need key stakeholder involvement. You need the right resources with the proper skills in place. You also need to deploy the latest technologies. In mining, we have a clear roadmap for technology testing, evaluation and implementation.”
Kunert says Lhoist’s mining operations feature regular and transparent communications with workers’ councils, which help the company implement technological processes very quickly. “You also need representative machine operators and drivers with enthusiasm for technology to give you feedback and use it to win over [colleague] hearts and minds. This helps build trust around using machine data effectively to improve productivity.”
“Our team embraced new technology very well,“ said EGGERS‘ Nebel. “The use of Cat Command was, for us, a very big step into the future. Normally, you have a lot of pre-location site surveys to do for sites posing a higher safety risk [the recovery of unexploded ordnance (UXO) ammunition and other war relics] with employees going around with mine detectors and shovels. By using Cat Command, we don’t have to do that, so we can start work earlier and more safely, as no employees are onsite.“
The productivity features of VisionLink are an easy-to-use cloud-based platform that gathers and summarises machine telematics and jobsite data from all your equipment. Actionable performance data is transmitted to the web platform, allowing users to access it anywhere, anytime via a mobile device, tablet, or desktop, on or off the jobsite.
Expanding on how Caterpillar technologies have helped shape Lhoist’s work site and company back office functions, Kunert said: “I mentioned before the importance of having the right resources, and we have got the right people checking the purity of the [machine production] data and recommending ways to get production improvements. We used to have monthly production meetings, but with the productivity features of VisionLink, we can integrate more production data, allowing us to hold weekly meetings via Peakboard [industrial low-code software] to assess performance and results.
“With Caterpillar, we have also developed a tool that provides supervisors and production managers with daily updates on production data, enabling them to act on any issues immediately. The next step, which we’ve already tested, is to use a very powerful API [Application Programming Interface] to push the data from VisionLink to the tablets in the cabins of the truck drivers.
“All these efforts have led to more cost-effective production and allowed us to assess our costs and develop a competitive advantage.”
On the same topic, Eggers’ Nebel said: “The big change for us is having to look for a new generation of drivers, who can use Cat Command and appreciate what VisionLink offers. We now have the possibility of a single driver, in effect, stepping from one machine to another from a single Cat Command control station.
“We also have a support team in the back office that utilises VisionLink functionality to view machine idle times, which provides us with valuable insights, allowing us to be much more efficient onsite. We can also look into the heart of the machine if something is identified as being wrong.
“These are big steps in making us much more efficient and a safer company to work at.”
Tony Fassino highlighted that, in a Caterpillar bauma first, a machine operator would be based on the Caterpillar stand throughout the show, using Cat Command to operate a machine on a work site many miles from the Munich showground over full working days. “The operator will be getting their machine to do real work. It is not a demonstration, and the operator working the machine will be getting paid. It would be worth taking some time to look at that.”
Asked by Herwig Peschl how he sees off-highway machinery technology evolving over the next 10 to 20 years, Kunert responded: “It is now normal to have electric-driven mining equipment, and electric drives will become even more predominant in the mining industry. There will be more disruptive changes with automation technology. I also see an accelerated development of drones, which tends to begin in the military and is then adopted by various industries and impacts our civil world. Having autonomous or manually operated drones can create digital twins of our environment, helping mining equipment, for example, move around autonomously and be operated remotely.“
“I think the same way [as Kunert],“ said Nebel. “I hope to see such advances as soon as possible. We see it in the automotive world, and I think we can use similar automation technologies on our construction sites.”
Nebel asked Fassino what Caterpillar sees as the challenges and opportunities concerning technological advances.
“The bottom line is that the products we provide have to offer the lowest cost per tonne and owner-operator cost. We have focused heavily on understanding the job site and eliminating waste in processes, including fuel waste, operator motion waste, machine motion waste, and system energy losses. One way to limit waste is through the use of autonomous or semi-autonomous functions. Any time a job is performed, if you can eliminate machine motion from that action, you save something,“ said Fassino.
He continued: “Labour is very hard to find. Really good labour is very, very hard to find, so the autonomous or semi-autonomous machine function helps solve part of that. It can also make a good machine operator into a much better one.“
“We are all challenged to work out where AI [artificial intelligence] fits in our worlds. One of the key ways it fits into our industry is through machine learning, where functions are performed, and AI could be used to present a machine operator with a better and clearer way to do them.
Off-highway equipment trade media attendees were invited to submit questions for the Caterpillar customer panel to answer.
Responding to Aggregates Business’s question about how Caterpillar sees the quarry site of the future and the company’s ability to meet quarry customers’ onsite needs, Peschl said: “We have been active in the [machine] autonomy space for over 20 years. We have applied that knowledge and gained more knowledge. We already have Command for Hauling as part of our MineStar suite of technologies, and it’s present throughout the world. We are now applying that technology to meet the specific needs of the quarry, which are smaller and may not operate 24 hours a day.
“The new Cat 775 truck on the Caterpillar stand at bauma is showcasing our technology around autonomous capabilities. We have planned to introduce Cat 775s with autonomous functions in 2026. It is a 65-tonne unit that will allow quarry customers to apply this [autonomous hauling] to their sites.“
As Peschl noted, Caterpillar has already successfully implemented autonomous hauling for quarry customers with a 90-tonne Cat 777 truck fitted with Command for Hauling operating at Luck Stone’s Bull Run Quarry in Chantilly, Virginia, USA.
Asked which alternative fuel or power technologies Caterpillar envisages being part of the off-highway equipment industry’s long-term future, Fassino replied: “The way we’ve had to answer that is by not picking one, but picking almost all of them. You’ll see on the show floor some fully-electric machines. But typically, there will be few customers that will only have one [fuel/power] solution. That’s also the case today. You have to spread your research dollars. The energy journey that folks are on and their job sites can be very different. We are looking at engines that burn hydrogen, natural gas, and [fuel] blends.”
Asked about what technologies will have the biggest impact on the construction machinery sector, Fassino continued: “Integrated technology-based safety tools that improve safety across the whole of the job site will have the biggest impact. A simple example of this is a seatbelt monitor. Many incidents have occurred on job sites where machine operators have not been wearing their safety belts. Any way of monitoring and enforcing seat belt use is great. Just like in your car, if a light comes on or a noise goes off while you’re in the operator’s cabin, reminding you to fasten your seatbelt, that’s a step in the right direction. However, only the operator sees or hears that. Integrating a seatbelt monitor into VisionLink would enable an operations manager to track how frequently each machine operator uses their seatbelt. Those managers can spot patterns of seatbelt use over, say, a week or a month. Who keeps forgetting to use their seatbelt, and why? Those operators could then be spoken to and behaviours addressed.”
Fassino added that utilising AI-based technology for workforce training will have a significant impact on improving industry standards and driving efficiencies.
“We should not be having to tell a machine operator to wear their safety belt, but it can be like this. I like that safety-improving technology example,“ said Lhoist’s Louis-Florent Sion. “Mining is a big part of our future, and we are developing a new mine site in Germany. I think the use of autonomous machine systems will be key there, given all the constraints you have when putting a human to work underground.”
Commenting on how he saw the mine of the future, Kunert said: “Our use of machine automation technologies will continue. We use VisionLink and consistent fleet management software. We have RTK-based Leica [Geosystems] visual positioning on our trucks. We have drones and software to measure cut and fill volumes. We have also started using passive and active collision control – active on wheeled loaders, with autonomous emergency braking based on radar detection of rear obstacles, and passive on our trucks, which utilise cameras and lidar to differentiate between a person and a vehicle in front. We have also begun using a remote-controlled drill rig, which further enhances employee safety and efficiency. These technological developments are creating highly skilled and qualified job profiles, especially in the mining sector, which is leading the way in this area. I will stress, though, that autonomous machines and job sites without people is something I can’t imagine.”
