World-class crane management

In a tight world economy, there is no place for unreliability. This is true of all fields, including cranes. To keep cranes ship-shape, in a constant state of readiness and properly maintained is no longer just desirable – it is absolutely vital. A key weapon is the implementation of international crane standards.

A win-win situation

Everyone wins with international crane standards: builders produce better, higher quality products; operators enjoy safer working conditions and cranes with improved ergonomics. They can also rely on increased crane productivity with lower costs for use and maintenance. And business in general can expect fewer accidents, increased operational safety and increased reliability.

Without fear of exaggeration, we can say that annual savings of between 30 percent and 45 percent are feasible with quality maintenance and the use of international standards. Increased productivity comes from fewer failures and stops in production, while proper preventive maintenance routines increase the reliability of equipment performance. Using a mandatory defect history database, combined with inspections and repairs carried out by qualified crane specialists, fewer safety-related faults are found. By specifying qualification requirements for operators, and by providing specialists to train them, safety is enormously improved (crane operator errors are at the root of 73 percent of all crane accidents).

International standards provide crane maintenance firms with tools to evaluate how well they are meeting their customers’ requirements. In my experience with crane operations in paper mills in North America and Europe, such maintenance practice has reduced maintenance costs from anywhere between 33-64 percent, while reducing failures by 46-60 percent and safety incidents from 33-97 percent. The results of international standard level maintenance in steel mills are also impressive. Maintenance costs were reduced by 28-56 percent, failures reduced by between 50-83 percent and the reductions in safety-related incidents ranged from 63-95 percent. In the demanding US automotive industry annual crane defects decreased by 86 percent and maintenance costs fell by 57 percent.

Return on investment

With nearly ten million cranes in operation worldwide, it is not surprising that savings can be big when crane management programmes are fully implemented: an estimated US$3 billion per year. But money is not the only consideration. Throughout the world, there are increasing safety and environmental demands and regulations, and customers’ expectations are constantly on the rise.

A modern comprehensive crane maintenance programme pays substantial dividends when it is congruent with international standards. They lead to higher quality, which means greater reliability and enhanced customer satisfaction, giving those that apply them an all-round image of a professional global service provider. To become – and to remain – a successful service provider means paying special attention to developing and maintaining services that follow global requirements.

Authorities are also happy to see increased operational safety and increased reliability. Obvious benefits concern safety: there is a manifest increase in the human safety factor, increased equipment reliability, and an obvious decrease in the failure rate. Costs, too, go down, and quality goes up, and there is an increase in production.

Winning strategy

There are three basic approaches to crane maintenance: maintenance by in-house crews, service contract by the manufacturer, and service contract by a third-party crane maintenance organisation. All three approaches are appropriate if personnel have sufficient knowledge of both cranes and maintenance. The best investment is in the organisation that can do the most things right at the right price. The payback can be significant.

All the elements necessary for building a world-class crane management programme are included in the international standards, even though the design and execution of such a programme will still have to be coordinated by the plant maintenance organisation or an outside group contracted to handle the responsibility. The comprehensive crane maintenance programme will include crane inspection and evaluation by knowledgeable engineers, preventive maintenance tasks by operators and maintenance specialists, predictive maintenance technologies, and computerised maintenance management systems.

The approach at CranePartner International consists of three major elements: inspection, maintenance and continuous improvement. These processes draw on – and feed into – a databank. The inspection is carried out by an engineer, sometimes assisted by experienced technicians, and investigates structural, mechanical and electrical component and machinery conditions, lifting and travelling speeds, tolerances, temperatures, overloading, insulation and verifying safety aspects. Maintenance operations include the normal good practice of work-order-based planning and scheduling, carried out by experienced technicians. Crane operators would handle some basic procedures. The continuous improvement effort would typically include input and assessment by crane experts and engineers, based on a review of the crane management database and actual operating conditions, to analyse and optimise the utilisation of the cranes.

Gathering maintenance knowledge

Comprehensive knowledge of crane operation and maintenance is difficult to obtain. Pockets of excellence exist in crane builder and crane user companies and organisations throughout the world. But if no country or company has succeeded in gathering all the best knowledge and practice for designing, building, installing, operating and maintaining cranes, the efforts of ISO/TC96 have been promising. One of the most valuable committee activities for maintenance organisations is the standard for condition monitoring.