Alan Johnson has been ALLMI chairman for three and a half years, since April 2003. He is to remain on the ALLMI board until April, taking Rigby’s old role as commercial director in a job swap. He told Cranes Today that he has enjoyed the role, and said “I was elected to evolve ALLMI into a proactive form. We’ve achieved and exceeded that, and it’s time for someone else to take that forward. Mark Rigby, along with the excellent board, drove these changes with me.”

Rigby, until now the commercial director of the association, explained how Johnson and he, along with a handful of other ALLMI members such as Ben James of Avon Cranes and David Gardner of Hiab UK, had formed a working group four years ago to look at ways to develop ALLMI into an effective trade body: “We looked to increase funding through increased subscriptions and commercial projects. When Alan was elected chairman, we worked on building our link with the Health and Safety Executive, and can now display their logo on ALLMI publications.

“We’ve developed an operators forum within ALLMI to support end users, which now has around 30 corporate members; we’re aiming to reach 100 members. We amalgamated ALLMI training, which had been set up as a side project, into ALLMI, giving us a proper backroom team and an additional income stream.

“We’ve also started a buyers co-operative, to help smaller members benefit from bulk prices. So far, two companies have taken part in an insurance deal through the scheme, cutting their indemnity premiums. We’re looking at being able to offer bulk prices on steel and hydraulic oil too. This has all helped us turn ALLMI into a proper, professional and self-financing business, for the benefit of the whole membership.”

The latest project for ALLMI is a new market statistics scheme. Five representatives of the five main lorry loader manufacturers in the UK (T H White, Hiab UK, Atlas Terex, HMF, and Fassi) will all submit quarterly invoiced sales figures to ALLMI’s accountant, Richard Shaw. He will then produce a market statistics report, split into categories, to allow manufacturers to accurately work out their market share. This is expected to be a valuable tool for the manufacturers, and may be used to generate information on trends in the sector.

Rigby expressed his enthusiasm for his new role, and said, “I’m glad to be carrying on the work Alan and the team have done so well over the last few years.”