Customers wanting better reliability is nothing new, but with our new product quality initiatives, including the product verification centre, we’re able to demonstrate the advances we’re making. The latest cranes we’ve introduced, such as the Grove GMK6300L are showing incredibly low warranty claim figures, and that’s a direct result of the time and effort we’ve put into designing and testing the cranes, as well as the improvements we’ve made at the manufacturing end. There are hundreds of customers around the world who are happy to invest in high quality cranes providing they feel confident in the uptime they can achieve. We’re providing cranes for those customers and it’s paying off.
The product verification centre will allow us to undertake major component testing in controlled environments at much faster speeds than would be possible in the field. By understanding the future performance of components, we can ensure the correct combination of elements is included in each new crane design. Also by understanding how whole cranes perform over their predicted lifecycle we can now see more easily and more quickly where weaknesses caused by long-term use might arise. Using this information we can make design improvements. This is a process that would previously have taken years of field monitoring and analysis, but which we can now complete inside months or even weeks.
Let me give you a quick example of how the product verification centre helps us. In Q4 2011, we identified an electrical swivel failure that we could predict would occur after 700 or 800 running hours in the field. When we identified this, we took the decision to freeze production of this crane and worked with the supplier to get the design and manufacturing issues related to this failure resolved. This would not have been possible without the product verification centre.
With data on how components perform in different situations and at different working rates, we can better understand exactly which of our cranes specific components are suited to. Within our global engineering and innovation teams we’re already moving towards a program of using fewer components across our crane range. This allows customers and dealers to keep smaller stocks of parts, plus it also simplifies maintenance as engineers become more familiar with components.
Shortening product development times will help us bring the latest Manitowoc designs to market much faster. The applications in which our customers work are constantly changing as construction designs and industrial processes move forward. It’s important that lifting technology keeps pace with the changing market, helping our customers complete jobs faster and more efficiently using one of our cranes, rather than a competitor’s.
