Equipment is a vital piece of everyday life for riggers.
Maintaining and properly storing that equipment is not something to be taken lightly. Improper care of even the smallest hoist can have dire consequences to the load, your crew or both.
A 50-ton air chain hoist on LGH's test stand.
In the past, logs were kept manually, carefully cataloging each piece of equipment, what service had been done, and when the final service and certifications had taken place. The advent of technology has eased the burden of tracking maintenance schedules, digitizing the logs and creating an easier method of keeping track of required yearly certifications. A new breed of equipment has been popping up over recent years that is further advancing the ease in tracking everything from the maintenance schedules to the loads seen by the equipment.
Traditional equipment, everything from the trusted screw-pin shackle to 100-ton air hoists, provides no means of tracking overloads, maintenance of internal parts (when applicable) or frequency of use outside of visual and manual logs. While effective, this method leaves a large margin for error, allowing for some pieces that are in high-demand or infrequently used to potentially miss the mandatory annual inspection and certification and still find themselves employed in field use. It's when this situation arises that the rate of catastrophic failure drastically increases on the jobsite.
Far too often, a company relies on the belief that someone is keeping track of the equipment maintenance and "the way it's always been done" will always be safe. That is, until the day it isn't. We have all seen too often that change doesn't come until it is too late. Typically, it only occurs after someone has suffered the loss of a limb or worse. Streamlining the way equipment is managed, whether assigning a single person who is focused solely on that task or investing in technology to aid in keeping track of each piece of equipment in your fleet, can greatly reduce the likelihood of jobsite accidents and the ensuing lawsuits or fines.
Every piece of equipment gets a fresh coat of paint after passing return inspection.
Some companies utilize third-party software, while at LGH we have also invested in technology, creating our own software to track every piece of equipment in our fleet across every warehouse throughout North America. Our software has the ability to track the maintenance history of every piece of equipment down to the smallest nut and bolt, where it has been utilized and how frequently each piece has gone on rent. Even with that level of focus, the industry has continued to progress, and the onus is on each of us to choose to either keep up or be left behind.
One recent addition to fleet management technology has been the advent of RFID scanning to quickly and easily identify and track the movement and history for each piece of equipment in a fleet. Depending on the size of your fleet, some may find the minutiae of tagging each piece of equipment to be a more daunting task than they would like to delve into. A few years back, LGH decided to take on that task and slowly began incorporating RFID tags on every piece of our equipment after testing the benefits in one of our higher-volume rental centers.
RFID tags, when properly utilized and paired with accompanying software, allow fleet owners to catalog, document maintenance logs, track repairs, determine usage statistics on each equipment type and more. You can even track the cost of maintenance and repairs on each specific piece of equipment to determine the true cost of ownership. That level of data can enable you to fine-tune your equipment purchasing decisions, allowing for equipment to be removed or added based on use and may even sway a decision to rent for a project rather than purchase.
Looking into the future, new equipment is arriving on the market from major manufacturers to drill even further into the proper care and usage of each piece of equipment on jobsites. Some manufacturers have begun including limit technology in some of their electric hoist lines, allowing users to set the hoist limits directly from the pendant rather than through the hoist body.
Assembling a Modulift™ modular spreader beam for delivery.
We have seen digital load links that were an early entry in the "smart" equipment segment expand from simply being a device used to determine load share at a specific pick point to incorporating that same technology into other products. There are now compression load cells that can be used to weigh and verify center of gravity and even report the individual load seen at each cell when paired together with their corresponding software. More recently, wireless shackles, designed for use in headroom-restrictive environments, have been produced that are capable of relaying load information to a receiver operated away from the load, thereby allowing the user to adjust the rigging plan when set up for dynamic load testing. A quick dive into these product offerings turns up several other devices for a range of projects and applications.
All of these innovative "smart" equipment offerings seek to simplify our age-old processes; ease the burdens of those on-site; and create new, data-driven practices from which we can streamline our operations. Those willing to buy in on this movement will attest to the benefits, while others are wary of these new products as being something of a fad.
The technological age of smart equipment, however, has grown exponentially over the years and now encompasses almost everything used within our industry. The choice falls on each of us to determine whether we jump on the trend now and weigh the costs of advancing ourselves in the technological age versus sticking with the tried-and-true methods of old, continuing the "this is the way we've always done it" mantra. Does the cost of investing in the future not outweigh the cost of an employee's welfare? It's now time to look inward and reflect on how safe we feel our practices are and ask how confident we are in the practices of those from whom we rent or buy equipment. At LGH, we've fully bought into the wave of the future. Where do you stand?
For more information, visit www.rentlgh.com/bic, email rentals@rentlgh.com or call (800) 878-7305.
