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Looking to increase your company's efficiency and profits? A compact excavator could help. These useful machines, weighing up to about 15,000 lbs., can replace several workers and help complete many jobs faster.

What a compact excavator can do
The compact excavator, or mini hydraulic excavator (MHE), is a versatile machine that can handle many tasks. "The compact excavator is what I call a Swiss Army knife," says Matthew Hendry, product consultant for hydraulic excavators and ADT at John Deere. "With the addition of a manual or hydraulic coupler, it can change work tools very easily. This lets it do nearly any task you can put before it. You're limited by imagination rather than by what the machine will do."

The compact excavator is a good machine for jobs requiring travel across different surfaces and jobs where work must be done close to obstacles or where access is tightly restricted, says Darren Wilson, mini hydraulic excavator industry marketing manager at Caterpillar Inc. Typical tasks include excavation, grading, truck loading, compaction, and both breaking and loading for concrete removal.

"Compact excavators are well suited to a variety of job requirements, like site prep, foundation and footers, utility work (electrical and plumbing), craning (septic tanks or junction boxes), demolition, and landscaping, and especially for working where space is limited," notes David Caldwell, product marketing manager at Komatsu.

"Flatwork contractors doing residential work can save on labor by using it to pick up broken concrete instead of having workers do it," Hendry says. This will prevent workers from developing back problems and could reduce health insurance costs. "Most laborers on a concrete crew are the same ones who will do the finish work," he adds. "Why risk them to injury when you can do it much more efficiently with a hydraulic compact excavator? The compact excavator is just plain faster than humans can move and it doesn't need a break."