For good or bad, the crane and construction industries are a thicket of standards and regulations. If you also move cranes by road, or transport heavy loads, that thicket becomes even more dense and tangled.
If you want to keep your business running efficiently, it’s vital to know which regulations and standards apply to your work. If you want to make sure you don’t face unreasonable restrictions on your business, you need to go a stage further and keep an eye out on proposed changes.
A couple of weeks ago, a contact emailed me an excerpt from the February 1, 2011 edition of the US Federal Register, highlighting an EPA hearing into how mobile material handling equipment is regulated by the California Air Resources Board. It’s a pretty obscure and specific topic for most of us, but it’s the sort of thing that might break your business if it applies to you.
Often, it’s easy for upcoming changes like this to pass you by until it’s too late. As I found out interviewing Rob Weiss last year, US crane users were only made aware of the radical changes to the European standard covering the use of capacity limiter override switches on mobile cranes by chance.
At meetings of crane user groups, I’ve seen how even the most well-informed experts in the industry can miss these changes, or be unaware of the regulatory environment in nearby markets. That’s not a criticism of the industry, but a mark of how the level of complexity of an industry like this makes it impossible for any individual to remain perfectly informed.
What can you do to make sure you don’t miss a chance to have a say in new regulations and standards? You could keep an eye on publications like the Federal Register and the EU’s official journal yourself. But, if you’re running a business, you’re unlikely to have time to do that on a regular basis, and it makes for baffling reading a lot of the time. A better way is to keep engaged in an efficient and relevant trade association, like ESTA in the EU, the US SC&RA, or CICA in Australia. You should also consider making use of online tools: that Californian ports issue was also highlighted on the Cranes and Hoists Professionals Group on LinkedIn.com.
Finally, help us here to help you. If you’re aware of an upcoming change, call or email me, and let me know what’s happening and why it matters. I’ll try and get the word out.
