Whether it is lifting African elephants into their new homes, rollercoasters into place or helping construct a new power station, ABA Crane Hire is often the first name people turn to.
The family-owned business has developed into one of the leading independent specialists in its field in the West Midlands, operating a 32-strong fleet of vehicles that include iron fairies, self-erecting towers and all terrain cranes up to 220 tonnes. It has invested more than £10m over the last five years on continually upgrading its equipment, and the next part of that strategy was focused on improving the safety of drivers whilst on the road and on-site.
As you can imagine, driving these large vehicles is a skill in itself, but traditionally the operator will have little additional technology providing extra visibility from the cab.
ABA prides itself on its excellent health and safety record and started to explore a range of systems that would help reduce the possibility of accidents by increasing visibility to see all around the crane/lorry.
The workshop manager had heard of Spillard Safety Systems’ technology and invited the company in to see how it would approach visibility issues on two cranes in particular.
These were the Liebherr LTM 1110-5.1 – purchased by ABA as a UK-first last year – and the Demag AC 45 city crane. Specialists from Spillard visited the yard in Bloxwich, first carrying out a visibility study using its tried and tested approach and then looked at the different cameras it could fit around the vehicles.
It was agreed that the best solution would be a combination of four live cameras with DVR turn left/right alarms to warn vulnerable road users the vehicle was manoeuvring, and 180º degree cameras down the nearside and offside to give optimum visibility.
All of these could be hosted on Spillard Live, a new cloud-based platform that captures and streams real time video and analytics simultaneously.
After comparing the benefits of the different technologies, ABA Crane Hire decided that Spillard Live was going to give it the visibility and the compliance it was after and immediately fitted the system to the two cranes.
This was done quickly and efficiently on-site within a few weeks of the order being placed and has now been operational for just over four months.
Feedback from the drivers has been extremely positive, with their visibility dramatically improved and real-time access to the data proving important when an issue on-site was cleared up in a matter of minutes.
This involved some damage to the floor of a project which, at first, was thought to have been done by the ABA crane. On review of the video, you could clearly see this had already happened, relieving the firm of any liability.
Adrian Baggott, Operations Manager, added his support: “We have some excellent people working for us and our main priority is to keep them and the other individuals they work with safe.
“What we’ve got with the Spillard solution goes way above our initial requirements and has made a massive difference when sorting out minor incidents on-site and allowing us to see how effective our operators have been.
“One benefit we didn’t expect was being able to use the cameras to get a project update if a client wants a real-time progress report. We’ve been so impressed with Spillard Live that we’ve decided to commit to installing it on every new crane we purchase moving forward.”
Adrian Baggott, Operations Manager, ABA Crane Hire
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