Hopefully, though, there’s still time for you to sign up. It’s free to join us as a guest, and the amount and quality of information on offer makes it more than worth an afternoon of your time.
I’m biased, of course, but I’d still challenge anyone in our industry to argue that we don’t have an impressive, important line-up of speakers.
Opening the schedule will be Demag, with sales director Markus Otto discussing their automated cranes and warehousing systems. I’ve seen one of these systems in action—during a visit to a paper production facility in Austria, which Demag organised as part of their 200-year anniversary celebrations last year—and it’s not an understatement to say that it seemed like a factory of the future; the type of fully-automated, computercontrolled operation that would have seemed like science fiction not too long ago. It’s a fascinating topic and I think it represents a great way of illustrating to our delegates what the lifting industry can offer. Talking of our delegates, before I forget—the event isn’t just about our speakers, as excited as I am about their presentations. You can also interact with both other delegates, just as you could at a ‘real-life’ event, and our sponsors, who will have representatives and downloadable material available.
Going back to the conference agenda, we also have Khalid Sorensen, chief technical officer of handling systems at PaR Systems. PaR are a very interesting company, who produce, amongst other things, handling systems for nuclear power operations. I went to visit their facility up in the north-west of England around two years ago, located near the Sellafield nuclear power plant, and was allowed to operate an overhead crane— only at the PaR facility, I should clarify, not at Sellafield. I attempted to navigate a hanging load through a line of bollards, firstly without and secondly with PaR’s antisway system, and the difference was remarkable—I went from feeling like a total amateur, which of course I am, to somewhere approaching a professional crane operator in the space of a few minutes.
Again, it’s this sort of game-changing technology that needs to be seen and appreciated by everyone who uses lifting and handling equipment, across a huge range of end-use sectors. And I hope that, along with the technology presented by the seven other speakers whom I’ve not been able to mention in this particular article, the Overhead Crane and Hoist Innovation Conference should help to achieve that.
Daniel Searle, editor
