Karl Ahlgren, marketing manager at Pervidi, discusses the benefits of digitalising inspection.
Whether using leased or rental assets or your own lifting equipment, it is fundamental that you have a lifting inspection procedure in place. In order to meet the recommendations that are set by LEEA (The Lifting Equipment Engineers’ Association), you must consider how you will use your lifting equipment and how you wish to conduct your lifting inspection. This goes for the refurbishment and repair, maintenance, hire or end use by an operator of machinery. For this to occur it is imperative to have a dynamic, tailored and powerful inspection solution in place. Overhead lifting equipment can be used for many different non-construction applications. This means that even though you may be using that equipment piece for one logistical task, you may be using another for a different manufacturing application in another instance or setting.
The perks of digital lifting inspection are farreaching, and the checks can be completed via a paperless inspection application run on any mobile device such as a smartphone or tablet. For non-construction applications, overhead lifting equipment is currently being used in a variety of sectors such as the pharmaceutical, distribution centres, warehousing, manufacturing, food and aerospace industries. What these all have in common is a reliance on thorough systems that can perform with reliability and accuracy. Often at the forefront of technology, these organisations are using complex machinery and expensive overhead lifting equipment; highlighting the obvious choice to pair this with an industry-leading inspection method.
Run via Android or Apple operating systems, mobile devices lend their features such as the built-in camera to the inspection application. This can for example be used heavily in logistics where barcodes and RFID might need to be scanned as part of a prestart check for the lifting equipment or even to check what is being moved. Using the camera, it is also possible to take pictures of hoist equipment for the lifting inspection and add them with or without annotation to the report or the certificate. In a setting where there are many different moving parts, vehicles or cargo, this quick visual inspection documentation provides data which is much more reliable than pen and paper reports. The mobile
device touchscreen gives the possibility to make drawings or highlight certain wear or faults with lifting equipment, highlighting focal areas for maintenance crews to look at. This can reduce the dead time spent in repairs, as the maintenance crews will likely receive the data from the inspection before the hoist equipment has been scheduled for service. If replacement parts are needed, these can therefore be ordered or located ahead of the repair schedule.
In areas where lifting equipment is leased or where it is moved about to several locations, GPS timestamps become a valuable piece of information. These can of course show where a report is made which inadvertently catalogues the equipment piece’s current use, but also provides the time of report stamp, which can tell the management team or inspector other things such as the overhead lifting machinery up or running time. Derived directly from the device itself, these GPS timestamps can be useful across a variety of industries, providing analytics insights to machinery assets.
A dynamic checklist system can provide several different types of checklist. Where a bridge crane may be used to move shipping cargo one day, it may have a different load the next. Then there are the different inspections any overhead lifting equipment may need. Passing industry regulations that are set by third parties is one common need, whereas organisations may decide to implement their own safety inspections and pre-start checks.
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