Company Company profile: Hiab Loader Cranes Probably the best in the world, certainly the most global

Hiab Loader Cranes, the world’s leading maker of productivity and safety enhancing loader cranes, has emerged from a five-year makeover with a customer-driven organisation and product range geared to lift its global competitiveness. A Hiab group product line, Hiab Loader Cranes differentiates itself from competitors in core areas of design innovation, engineering excellence and outstanding performance and service offerings.

“We have a growth-oriented strategy rooted in the diverse needs of customers on five continents seeking the best truck crane money can buy when it comes to performance, reliability and lower lifetime operating costs,” said Harri Ahola, Senior Vice President, Hiab Loader Cranes.

He adds: “Customers need to hear more from us than that we have the longest expertise in the industry, however. They want to see we have a market-driven approach with loader cranes that meets their specific truck loading requirements across many working environments.”

All around the world

Globally, Hiab is top-of-mind for truck fleet businesses seeking bottom line growth through higher load cycling speeds and greater productivity. Designed for quick, easy and minimal servicing, Hiab truck cranes are renowned for their hydraulic valves delivering precision and smoothness, electronic safety and productivity features and user-friendly controls.

The global market for load handling equipment and systems is brisk after some five years of constant growth – and market size is expected to exceed €4 billion. The overall material-handling trend in Europe, as throughout the industrialised world, is towards greater production automation, remote control handling, and high-end services.

Most of Hiab Loader Cranes’ customers are in the building materials supply sector and industrial products transportation. The aim driving all truck operators serving such sectors – regardless of size of fleet – is to reduce labour costs, increase productivity, efficiency and safety and, at the end of the day, become more competitive in their own service offerings.

By providing multiple handling solutions with innovative loader cranes, Hiab plays a pace-setting role in helping customers, large or small, gain greater competitiveness by delivering high-value service. To deliver on the promise, Hiab Loader Cranes has implemented a long-term, future-proofing organisational change that has shifted the core thinking of the organisation.

“We’ve always put customers first, but now Hiab’s philosophy is about ensuring our loader cranes are totally driven by the needs of both our customers and theirs rather than by our factories,” Ahola said.

Origins

Innovative thinking dates back to the founding of the company in 1947, the brainwave of a ski manufacturer in the central-Swedish town of Hudiksvall, Eric Sundin. Lacking manual labour, he needed a better way to efficiently lift large numbers of birch tree trunks onto his trucks. When Sundin joined forces with business partner Einar Frisk, the loader crane was born.

Today, over 500,000 Hiab hydraulic loader cranes have been sold in 90 countries globally. Underlining its approach to delivering flexible solutions to meet every crane loader need, Hiab today offers customers over 110 different loader crane models with a lift capacity ranging between 0.8 to 76 tonne-metres. All supported by a powerful service network comprising 1,500 dedicated service centres around the world.

Hiab’s medium-size loader cranes still roll off a production line in a modern factory in Hudiksvall. However, to meet worldwide demand, the product line operates three other production facilities – in the Netherlands, Spain and Korea.

Hiab’s largest cranes are manufactured at Zaragoza in Spain, while its small to medium cranes, including rollers and other highly specialised loaders, are made in the Dutch town of Meppel. In the mid-1980s, Hiab entered into a joint venture partnership with a South Korean manufacturer to produce cranes designed for the Asian marketplace. In 1998, Hiab bought out its partner to assume full control of the South Korean operations.

Harri Ahola says that Hiab is closely monitoring emerging markets. “Whatever step we take next is a timing issue more than anything else – and we are well-prepared to meet future demand as it emerges,” he says.

Strength in depth

A core element of Hiab Loader Cranes’ strength is its ability to leverage the brainpower resources of the other members of the Hiab group, including MULTILIFT demountables, MOFFETT truck-mounted forklifts, ZEPRO tail lifts, and LOGLIFT and JONSERED forestry and recycling cranes. Hiab Loader Cranes also benefits from membership of the Finnish Cargotec Corporation, providing better utilisation of shared competences, benefits of scale in technology development and global networking.

Listed on the Finnish stock exchange, Cargotec also incorporates Kalmar, the world’s foremost container handling company, and MacGregor, the world’s leading provider of cargo handling solutions for the marine industry. In 2005, the Cargotec Group achieved sales of €2.4 billion, an increase of 24 percent over the preceding year. In the first nine months of 2006, Cargotec sales amounted to €1.9 billion compared to €1.73 billion for the same period the preceding year. Hiab group sales account for approximately 36 percent of the Cargotec Group total business.

The market

For more than five years, the crane market has been growing strongly everywhere, fuelled by an infrastructure boom stretching from Europe to Asia to the Americas. Main market growth has occurred in Europe, and the projections are it will continue – especially as the German economy begins to ignite. In the US, the downturn in the housing market has resulted in some natural levelling off in demand for load handling equipment, but sales remain brisk in other customer groups with a number of major orders for loader cranes. The market in Asia continues to grow.

“Europe is our largest market, accounting for around 60 percent of sales,” says Harri Ahola. “2006 has been a very good year with extensive loader crane orders coming in from key European customers looking for improved efficiency, safety, component standardisation and support. An important milestone came in March with the signing of a cooperation agreement with the Suez Environment (SITA) waste management company, making Hiab the preferred pan-European supplier of material handling systems.”

For six decades, the world-class engineering and design of Hiab’s loading cranes have provided outstanding reliability, high lifting capacity and multi-task productivity. But Hiab understands no company can rest on past successes. Therefore, recent years have seen a major milestone in product development and innovation, with the launch of a whole new product range built around a new modular design concept.

Tailor-made

Hiab’s loader cranes modular XS family, first launched in 2000, means the company no longer build standard cranes needing to be modified at a late stage. Today Hiab’s factories tailor-make each crane to a customer’s precise specification based on application demands. Not only does the customer get a factory solution with back up, documentation and spare parts, they also win improved quality because everything is built in from the start.

Harri Ahola says: “Building each crane to a customer order has put huge pressure on our way of thinking and manufacturing, demanding hard work at getting our organisation and logistics processes right. However, the shift helps differentiate us from our competitors because no-one can offer the level of customisation and variety of products delivered by Hiab Loader Cranes, which means increased productivity for customers in their daily life.”

The latest star in the Hiab XS range – the XS 477 40-44 tonne metre loader crane – was launched in April 2006. One of the most powerful cranes of its size available, the XS 477 has already proved a marketplace success thanks to its greater outreach, ability to deliver 10 percent greater lifting capacity than its nearest competitor and advanced electronic control systems.

Hiab Loader Cranes has invested heavily in its product development teams. There is a strong focus on bringing in younger open-minded people with advanced technology and CAD system skills designed to address such key issues as the environment, fuel efficiency, new materials and new market-driven, listen-to-the-customer ways of working. Tangible results are being delivered in the shape of exciting new products.

Late in 2006, Hiab launched its new Combidrive² remote control unit for use with the extremely versatile HiPro cranes. The innovative control unit offers a new, class leading generation in remote control systems, giving operators a safer, more accurate and user friendly means of control than any other comparable system in the marketplace today. Equipped with Bluetooth wireless connection, the core benefits of the Combidrive² include three interactive display screens ensuring the operator can instantly see all operational information.

“Truck loaders are operated by truck drivers, so a key aim is to keep our cranes safe and simple to operate,” says Harri Ahola. Safety is integral to Hiab Loader Crane thinking. Onsite studies have shown that remote operation of a crane helps eradicate the risk of drivers falling off the back of vehicles.

Hiab Loader Cranes has spent the opening years of this decade positioning itself for powerful future growth. That growth will be spurred by the company’s commitment to driving such strategies as customer focus, service focus and strengthening its loader crane business around the globe.

Hiab loader cranes mission statement makes it clear the company will listen and respond to the needs of its customers beyond delivering engineering quality and innovation. That promise already translates into such offerings as crane weight reduction to maximise truck payload and control system user friendliness, providing a broad spectrum of options throughout the Hiab range of products, which meet key EU standards.