Don't get caught up in the numbers -are you supplying the correct machine?
We are all guilty of getting caught up in headline grabbing numbers when it comes to lift height and capacities of machines. With this in mind it is important that as a customer you are purchasing the correct machine for your application and not being up sold for no reason and as a hire company you are utilising your equipment correctly.
When I started in the business, we were being blown away by machines that would lift 4 tonnes up to 21 meters yet, here we are now with machines lifting 8 tonnes and lift heights up to 46m. While the advance in technology has allowed these greater parameters sometimes these numbers are there just for bragging rights and they don’t actually allow the customer a more useful machine.
At Magni we make sure that the numbers on our machines mean something and that they will bring a genuine advantage to the customer. We have a huge range of rotating and heavy lift telehandlers so we don’t need to try and make customers take machines that are too big for their task. Just the other day I was talking to a customer who had been quoted a 7-tonne lift rotating telehandler from another manufacturer. He approached us about our 8-tonne capacity RTH 8.25 SH. My question to him was “did he ever lift 7 tonnes” and the answer was no but he needed capacity at radius and that it could only be done using a 7-tonne machine. After sitting with the customer, I explained that I would be happy to supply him with an 8-tonne capacity machine but that to match his lift plan he only needed a 6-tonne Magni RTH 6.26 SH as this machine had a better load chart for his requirements. In fact, at his loading point our 6-tonne exactly matched our own 8-tonne machine and outperformed the 7-tonne machine by some margin.
What this meant is the customer could get a smaller, lighter and less expensive machine that would fit his application. Should he have needed a true heavy lift machine then of course I would have quoted the Magni RTH 8.25 SH as this machine will lift a load of 5.3 tonnes to 25m, which is double the capacity of all other 25m machines but in this case, this would have been me misleading the customer into purchasing something that was not required.
It’s the same with our heavy lift telehandler range. I am often asked why don’t we make a 12 or 13 tonne machine as this is what everyone else does. The answer is that of course it would be nice to have something bigger but is it needed if it doesn’t actually give you more. There will always be times when the initial lift is important but think about it this way if all the customer wants to do is lift a load straight off the floor then there are numerous options to do this that will be more cost effective for them. What the majority of customers want is the ability to reach with that load and place at height or reach.
Because we know this is the case, we can sell our 10-tonne machine against 12 and 13 tonne machines on the market as the Magni 10.10 lifts the same and sometimes a little more at full reach than the 12 and 13 tonne machines yet in a much smaller, more manoeuvrable, faster and better equipped machine.
So next time someone asks you for a 5, 7, 10 or 13-tonne machine, look a little deeper into the application and see whether you can supply the customer with an alternative that will be more useful for their business.
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