Sam Reece is world’s best Hitachi technician
The 2019 Hitachi Top Technician Competition finals took place on 17 and 18 October in Japan with CablePrice’s Sam Reece being announced as the World’s Best Hitachi Technician
CablePrice has a long proud history with the annual Hitachi Top Technician Competition having now won it three times and also having been runners-up on several occasions.
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Mr Ikeda from Hitachi Construction Machinery with Sam Reece from CablePrice NZ |
The competition tests various levels of skills, including finding and diagnosing machine faults, written theory tests, and presenting in front of a judge’s panel about various findings regarding the machine in question.
Earlier this year in Auckland, after having already competed against 13 New Zealand competitors, Sam took out the title of Hitachi Top Technician for New Zealand.
Next came the Oceania round in August, competed at Hitachi Construction Australia’s Revesby Branch in New South Wales. This round in the competition consisted of the three Australians and Sam Reese from Greymouth. Sam once again came out on top and lead Sam to the finals.
The world finals at the Hitachi Technical Training Centre in Kasumigaura, Japan saw nine Hitachi trained technicians from around the globe competing to be named the best Hitachi Technician in the world. The country’s being represented were Turkey, China, France, Russia, India, South Africa, Japan, and, of course, New Zealand.
Sam’s day started with a 75-minute practical test in which he had to find three faults in the Hitachi ZX200-5B, the first of these faults being that the excavator didn’t start. None of the competitors found all three faults, however, Sam was the quickest off the mark to get his machine started again and went on to find the attachment fault rather quickly as well.
It was a nail-biting 75 minutes between Sam and Wakaba Uno of Japan, who amazingly was the first women ever to compete in the Hitachi Top Tech Finals. Sam was hit with a disadvantage when his Hitachi ConSite maintenance app wasn’t working.
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The Hitachi Top Tech finalists
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Luckily, with his 13 years of Hitachi knowledge, he didn’t panic and recreated the results from the app straight into excel. Another added pressure was the audience and cameras.
"‘There was a live audience and camera crews everywhere, as Hitachi was recording event," Sam says. "Dealing with the cameras and lights in your face while all the time I had to be thinking about the work in hand; it was intense."
The next portion of the competition was the reporting section in which the contestants had to create a presentation of the processes they took in repairing the machine and present it to the panel of judges.
Later that evening at the award ceremony Sam was announced the winner of Hitachi Top Technician 2019 by Mr Ikeda, vice president and executive officer, general manager of life cycle support operations division for Hitachi Construction Machinery.
Sam is honoured to be awarded the title of the World’s Best Hitachi Technician and has been sharing his victory with his CablePrice support team as well as the Greymouth community, all of which are proud of him.
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