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The sentence comes up in every second conversation: but we have a crane. It is almost always true – and still rarely answers the question at hand. Because capacity is not the same as suitability.
It lifts a lot, it reaches the whole hall, and it is paid for. For goods inwards, for machine moves, for the single heavy lift it is the right tool – nobody builds a second system for that. As a reserve for maintenance and rebuilds it is irreplaceable too. The question is never whether the crane stays, but whether it is the right route for a task that occurs forty times a day.
On a rope the load hangs free and swings. For aligning to a bearing seat, a fixture or a flange that means two people, one on the pendant, one on the load. The lift itself takes seconds, the alignment minutes. On top of that, slinging and releasing cost time every time, and the load cannot be put down on the way without being re-slung.
A crane is a shared resource. Whoever uses it blocks it for every other point in the hall – and whoever needs it waits. In plants with one crane per several thousand square metres that is the bottleneck determining cycle times without ever appearing in a figure. A dedicated device above one workstation takes exactly those requests out of the queue and frees the crane for what it was built for.
We calculate not with purchase prices but with minutes. Forty operations a day, each with two minutes more waiting and aligning than necessary, make over eighty minutes of standstill daily – at one station. Against that stands a device costing a fraction of an additional crane, installed in days and occupying no floor space. Where the calculation does not work out we say so too: at two operations a day the crane remains the right answer.
| Situation | Overhead crane | Dedicated device |
|---|---|---|
| Single heavy lift | right | oversized |
| Goods inwards, machine moves | right | not sensible |
| Recurring task at a station | too slow | right |
| Joining and fine positioning | swings | guides rigidly |
| Several points at once | blocks | independent |
| Cycled production | unplannable | plannable |
If the task involves aligning or joining: yes. Availability is only one of two arguments; the other is that a load on a rope cannot be held in position. Where two people align, a rigid device saves time regardless of crane utilisation.
Yes, and that is often the best solution: the crane brings the load into the area, the workstation device does the fine work. What matters is a clean handover point where the working areas overlap without the installations getting in each other way.
That solves availability, not accuracy – and costs many times more. Where one hall area permanently has too little crane, a rail system above that area is almost always the more economical answer.
With two figures from the plant: how often the operation occurs per shift and how long it takes today, measured from asking for the crane to the load being set down. Both can be gathered in a morning. That makes a robust calculation – everything else is estimation.
The whole area covered – in X and Y.
View deviceThe jointed arm for millimetre-precise handling.
View deviceCompact power for vertical lifting.
View deviceOne unit at eight stations beats eight units.
Read the articleThe second person is the most expensive line in the calculation.
Read the articleThe question is never “which unit?”. It is “which movement?”.
Read the articleManaging Director, Entracon Planungsgesellschaft mbH
Engineer with a doctorate, specialising in plant engineering, digital design and process automation – from simulation through to commissioning.
A short conversation usually settles more than three quotations. You reach an engineer directly, not a queue.
Start typing – for example “balancer”, “SAP” or “pipe stress”.
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