Caterpillar vs. The world Since 1986, Caterpillar Inc. also known best as Cat, the big massive yellow trucks, is one of the largest machinery and engine sellers. Because of the way it is managed, the organization has fought to be in top by being always ethical, by offering new innovations, a diverse employment, and most important a worldwide dealer network.
Caterpillar has 14 members in its top team management with in top Douglas R. Oberhelman as its CEO. In the late 2009, Caterpillar employed 93,813 persons, which 50,562 of them worked overseas. The company used expatriates such as former workers to work in subsidiaries countries, host-country nationals such as native workers, and third-country nationals such as other people from other native working in one of the overseas subsidiaries. This allows the organization to have an advantage over its competitors because of its diversities in employees. Currently, caterpillar has over 100-language costumer service and is able to provide service worldwide.
Caterpillar’s most competitive advantage is its worldwide dealer network. Caterpillar used offshoring and has set shop all around the world, allowing costumers to buy, fix, and uptime an engine right near them. Out of 110 facilities that Caterpillar owns, 59 of them are offshore. As in chapter 6, International Management, Caterpillar uses the Multinational Model, where the company has many subsidiaries overseas that work as its own unit to respond to local conditions.
Being able to survive and making profit means to beat the competition. Giving the costumer something new, faster, good quality, cheaper, and not to mention providing a great costumer. And Caterpillar Inc is doing just that with its speed, service, innovation, quality, technology, and cost competitive.
Most of the costumers that buy machinery from Caterpillar are using the equipments for a job purpose to make a profit. If the machinery breaks it could be a loss of income to the costumer. However, this is where Caterpillar has the most competitive advantage over the other competitors. Cat has dealers all around the world that carry lots of parts for different engines, and have trained engineers in site. To have the machinery up and running under two hours is a huge competitive advantage over 48 hours of the competitor. Also, if the dealer does not have a particular part, a costumer could order it and have it shipped to their house or to the dealer by the next day.
Dealing with big, massive, expensive objects it is hard to innovate new products in a short period of time. Caterpillar knows the importance of innovation and has roughly more than 8,000 skilled technical experts and 350 PhD-level scientists working in the research and development department to find new innovation to beat competition. Caterpillar had set foundation in China for over 36 years. However, LiuGong Machinery is China’s number one leading manufactory. Oberhelman cannot stress enough to be leading number one in China’s market. As of right now Caterpillar has the advantage in hand. The engines have new technology that LiuGong Machinery does not have yet. Allowing Caterpillar to provide more productive results. Although Caterpillar has new innovation, Oberhelman is looking to improve farther because he wants to be number one in the market because he is afraid LiuGong Machinery will reach Caterpillars new technology and reach out globally.
A costumer has to think twice before purchasing an engine. The cost is very expensive, and he/she has to make sure the product bought has to last for a very long time. As you might not see it at first, but Caterpillar does have competitive advantage in price. It might cost more than its rival Komatsu to initially purchase an engine but at the end of the life of the engine, the cost is less than Komatsu’s engines. Caterpillar’s one of the motto’s is “Ensure that customers make more money using Cat equipment than using competitors equipment” and they are
