Ardent’s order comprises supply Komatsu PC138US (13-tonne), PC210LC (21-tonne) and PC360LC (36-tonne) crawler excavators.
On the back of growing demand, Ardent is growing its excavator fleet by 800 units this year.
It went out to tender for various sizes and quantities of excavator, with Marubeni-Komatsu winning an initial deal worth around £9m to supply a number of PC138US, PC210LC and PC360LC excavators. Reliability and a high standard specification won the bid for the Komatsu dealer. The inclusion of Komatsu Care for the first three years / 2,000 hours of servicing was also seen as a plus point.
The spec across all three models include coupler buckets, ‘boxing ring’ handrails on top and Komatsu’s all-round vision camera system, Komvision, which all comes as standard on all excavators of 13 tonnes and above. Many of the 13-tonne machines have also been fitted with Prolec height and slew restrictors, to enable them to work on rail and highway projects.
All the Komatsu machines also include Komtrax telematics as standard, allowing information about each machine to be sent to Ardent every two hours.
The last of the units are scheduled for delivery by the end of this month (October).
Ardent head of marketing Anuj Patel said: “Ardent recognise that their customers want to hire reliable, compliant machines, because that gives their customer one less thing to worry about. Hirers want to feel reassured that their machinery supplier can meet – if not exceed – all their health & safety standards and will not break down. That’s why we only work with premium manufacturers such as Komatsu – for peace of mind that the equipment is safe and compliant, but also that it’s reliable.”
Ardent’s excavator uptime for 2017 was recorded at 99.6%. In support of this Marubeni-Komatsu were able to use Komtrax to demonstrate that in the first 12 months their PC138US on average records an uptime of 99.98%.
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