Precise planning for perfect practice

There, a speaker described the importance of planning to safe lifting. As much as any clever operator assistance device or perfectly optimised crane, or even operator and lifting crew expertise, planning in this industry saves lives. Whether you're using a general lift plan to cover a routine job, like building materials delivery, or one of the thousand-tonne-and higher heavy lifts Sotiris describes in this issue, every step should be planned for; if you're surprised by something unexpected during a lift, that's a good sign things may be going very wrong.

The stakes for journalists are, generally, much lower than for construction crew, but still, planning is key, and over recent weeks I've been planning what we'll be covering in the magazine in 2019, through to the start of 2020.

Top of the list, of course, will be Bauma in Munich. I'm confident that, with crane orders roaring ahead again for many manufacturers (as shown in our results news this month), we can expect one of the more exciting German shows of recent years.

Bauma will take up many pages of the magazine, throughout the first six months of the year. We'll have a show guide and two show previews in the first three issues of the year. I'm sure the crane manufacturers' marketeers reading this have their own meticulous plans underway; I'm looking forward to the point in December and early January where we start receiving product launch announcements for our February preview issue.

By the end of this year, we'll have been to France for Intermat, Italy, Denmark, Sweden, Holland, Ireland, Singapore, Australia, the USA, and China. In 2019, with Bauma taking up so much time and so many resources, my plan is for us to do fewer trips, but to spend more time on each, further away from our European home. I'd welcome suggestions of countries and companies we should visit.

I'm currently weighing up whether we can make it to New Zealand for CANZ's conference, with a mini tour of crane users in Hong Kong on the way. I'd like to get one of the team out to visit manufacturers in Japan, as I did a few years ago. And I think the Spanish tower crane industry is due a tour.

Our feature list—the calendar of what topics we will cover each issue—will include many of the same themes as in previous years. I am considering a couple of new areas though: devices other than cranes used for lifting, and cranes used in applications that go beyond lifting. Here, too, I'd be glad of your feedback.