Case Study
Komatsu Mining
About
Komatsu Mining
Komatsu is one of the world’s leading—and the second-largest—manufacturers of construction and mining equipment, with approximately 66,700 employees worldwide and consolidated net sales of around ¥4.1 trillion (roughly US$27 billion) in its most recent fiscal year. Headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, the company operates on a truly global scale, with 279 bases of operation, including 71 manufacturing locations across 17 countries and 208 sales operations serving customers in 151 countries. Its mining equipment supports large fleets and round-the-clock operations in both open-pit and underground environments, where reliability, safety, and performance are mission-critical.
Within this ecosystem, the mining division designs and supports highly sophisticated machines that operate in demanding, high-risk conditions where every minute of downtime is costly and every safety incident is unacceptable. Komatsu’s customers rely on front-line technicians, electricians, and maintenance teams to keep this equipment running. These professionals must be able to diagnose issues quickly, follow the right procedures under pressure, and make safe, high-consequence decisions in the field. The training expectations are therefore extremely high: customers do not simply purchase machines, but an entire ecosystem of support, including training that reflects Komatsu’s engineering excellence, long-term reliability, and deeply embedded safety culture. This is especially true for diagnostic systems like Fault Finder, where technicians are expected to follow a precise, logical process to identify the source of a problem and determine appropriate corrective actions.
At the same time, the internal experts who define these standards—principal engineers, senior technicians, and product specialists—are among the most valuable and time-constrained people in the organization. They are responsible for product performance, field support, customer escalations, and ongoing improvements, and are continuously in demand. Any training initiative that depended on them to write detailed scripts, design exercises, or repeatedly deliver live sessions was simply not realistic. The challenge was to capture their expertise once, as efficiently as possible, and convert it into a high-quality, reusable VR training experience focused on one of the most critical capabilities in a mine: fault-finding on complex equipment subsystems, starting with a cutter motor issue in the Fault Finder system, and then scale that experience globally without adding to their already stretched workload.
Context and Challenges
Historically, technical training for mining equipment has been built around slide decks, manuals, and occasional hands-on access to machines in a workshop or test yard. Subject-matter experts would be asked to “walk people through” a system, often by presenting dense PowerPoint decks or conducting ad hoc sessions when their schedules allowed. The quality of these sessions depended heavily on who was available on a given day and how much time they could spare.
As equipment and diagnostic systems became more sophisticated, this model began to show its limits. The information technicians needed to master was detailed, interconnected, and constantly evolving, yet the training materials themselves often remained fragmented: a slide deck here, a PDF there, a recording stored somewhere else. When a new technician joined, or when a new customer site ramped up, the burden fell back on the same group of experts to deliver another round of explanations and walk-throughs.
Those experts were already under intense pressure. They were responsible for resolving live incidents, supporting field teams, answering customer questions, and contributing to the design and improvement of the products themselves. Training was critical, but it competed directly with urgent operational work. In practice, this meant that the people with the deepest knowledge had the least time available to turn that knowledge into formal, scalable training.
Komatsu wanted to break out of that cycle. The company needed a way to give technicians many more repetitions on critical fault-finding scenarios without requiring the constant presence of a senior engineer or product specialist. It wanted the training to reflect the real logic and nuance of how experts think through a problem, rather than a simplified or generic version. And it needed to do this in a way that respected the reality that internal subject-matter experts were already working at the edge of their capacity.
The success of any training solution would therefore depend on how well it could leverage SME expertise while minimizing the time those SMEs had to spend on content production. Komatsu needed a partner that could do the heavy lifting: extracting the diagnostic process from experts in short, highly focused sessions, and then turning that into an immersive, reusable VR training experience.
Why Selected LAAS by Genius
Komatsu was not looking for a vendor to simply “build a VR module.” The company needed a partner that understood how to work in SME-constrained environments and could assume responsibility for the entire instructional and production pipeline.
LAAS by Genius operates as a fractional L&D and training production department for large organizations. This model is built around a simple principle: experts are busy, and their time is precious. Rather than asking SMEs to write scripts, design exercises, and manage reviews, LAAS structures the engagement so that experts contribute their knowledge in short, focused bursts, and the LAAS team does the rest.
A key differentiator in this project was LAAS’ ability to bring in its own mining engineers who already had hands-on experience working with Komatsu machines and mining operations. These external specialists acted as a bridge between Komatsu’s internal SMEs and the creative production team. They spoke the same technical “language” as Komatsu’s engineers, understood how the equipment behaves in real mine environments, and could translate that into clear guidance for instructional designers, animators, and 3D artists.
For Komatsu, this meant structured discovery sessions where LAAS facilitators and mining engineers guided internal engineers and senior technicians through the actual fault-finding process they would follow when faced with a cutter motor issue in the Fault Finder system. Instead of handing over a blank page and asking experts to “document the procedure,” LAAS asked targeted questions, captured the logic and decision points in real time, and then refined that raw narrative with the help of its own mining engineers to ensure every step made sense both technically and instructionally.
Once those key sessions were completed, SME involvement shifted from content creation to validation. LAAS drafted the scenarios, decision trees, feedback logic, and in-experience messaging and then brought them back to the experts at specific, pre-agreed checkpoints. At each review, Komatsu SMEs and LAAS mining engineers could focus on confirming accuracy, refining details, and flagging nuances that needed to be preserved, rather than starting from scratch.
This approach allowed Komatsu to turn the deep expertise of a few extremely busy individuals into a reusable, scalable VR training asset. Internal experts remained the ultimate authority on what “right” looks like, while LAAS’ mining engineers and production teams absorbed the day-to-day work of scriptwriting, storyboarding, and technical visualization.
Solution Overview
The joint Komatsu–LAAS solution is built around a realistic, high-stakes scenario: diagnosing and resolving a cutter motor-related fault using the Fault Finder system. The training experience combines an immersive VR simulation with supporting eLearning modules, facilitator guidance, and quick-reference materials. All elements are grounded in the same SME-validated diagnostic logic, so that every component reinforces the same standard.
At the heart of the solution is the diagnostic narrative captured from Komatsu’s subject-matter experts and enriched by LAAS’ mining engineers. Together, they mapped out, step by step, what an expert actually does when confronted with a suspected cutter motor issue: what they notice first, which readings and indicators they consider reliable signals, how they triage potential causes, and where they slow down to double-check a safety condition or a critical assumption. That narrative then became the spine of the immersive VR experience.
Partnership Model and Governance
The collaboration between Komatsu and LAAS was deliberately structured around SME constraints. From the outset, both teams agreed that expert time was the scarcest resource in the system, and the engagement was designed accordingly.
LAAS proposed a workflow built on a small number of high-value SME sessions. During those sessions, facilitators and mining engineers captured the diagnostic narrative, decision points, and safety considerations in as much detail as possible. After each session, LAAS translated that raw expertise into draft learning designs, scripts, and interaction flows that were technically vetted by its mining engineers before being returned to Komatsu for review.
Review cycles were planned so that SMEs could engage in short, focused bursts rather than open-ended iterations. They were asked specific questions, presented with concrete options, and invited to approve or fine-tune elements rather than build them from scratch. The result was a working relationship where experts remained firmly in control of technical accuracy and realism, but did not need to become instructional designers or production managers.
Behind the scenes, LAAS orchestrated a multidisciplinary team of instructional designers, mining engineers, 3D artists, interaction designers, and developers. The internal governance on the LAAS side ensured that SME feedback was implemented consistently and that each iteration moved the project closer to a polished, deployable VR training asset. From Komatsu’s perspective, the experience felt like working with a dedicated internal training department that understood both the technical domain and the reality of limited expert bandwidth.
Outcomes and Impact
The VR fault-finding training experience has already begun to change how Komatsu and its customers think about diagnostics training. Technicians now have access to realistic, repeatable practice on a complex cutter motor scenario, something that would be difficult or impossible to arrange regularly on live equipment. They can make mistakes, reflect on feedback, and try again, all while internal experts focus on their primary responsibilities.
The training embeds a consistent, SME-validated diagnostic logic that can be applied across teams, sites, and regions. Every learner experiences the same sequence of decisions and the same expectations about safety and rigor, shaped jointly by Komatsu experts and LAAS mining engineers. Over time, this consistency helps reduce variability in how faults are approached and supports safer, more reliable operations.
Perhaps most importantly, the project demonstrates a repeatable pattern for using limited SME time to create scalable training. By combining structured knowledge capture, specialist mining engineers, and robust VR production, Komatsu and LAAS have created an asset that can serve many technicians over many years without requiring ongoing expert involvement at the same intensity. The initial cutter motor scenario is only the beginning. The same approach can be extended to additional systems, fault patterns, and procedures, continually amplifying the impact of a small group of very busy experts.
Summary
Through its partnership with LAAS by Genius, Komatsu Mining has transformed the way it uses subject-matter expertise in training. Instead of asking engineers and senior technicians to deliver the same explanations again and again, the company now channels their knowledge—supported and interpreted by LAAS’ mining engineers—into an immersive VR training experience that can be reused at scale.
The cutter motor fault-finding scenario built around the Fault Finder system shows what becomes possible when SME time is treated as the most precious asset in the process. With carefully structured discovery sessions, targeted reviews, specialist mining engineers bridging the gap between the mine and the studio, and a production team that handles the instructional and technical heavy lifting, Komatsu has created a training solution that is deeply realistic, fully aligned with its brand, and respectful of the people whose expertise makes it all possible.
This case illustrates a new standard for mining training: high-fidelity, SME-driven simulations that give technicians unlimited opportunities to practice critical diagnostics, while the experts themselves stay focused on keeping operations running and equipment performing at their best.