Built under the crane: how Lifting Protect was developed

Censiary Lifting Protect was not designed in an office and then taken out to site. It was designed by engineers whose background is CraneWave's work with cranes and lifting equipment in the waste-to-energy sector — people who have stood under the crane, climbed onto the walkways and written up the thorough examination afterwards. That background shaped almost every decision in the app.

One record per asset

The starting point is simple: every crane, hoist and lifting accessory has one record, and only one. Inspection history, defects, photographs and certificates all hang off that record, rather than being scattered across spreadsheets, shared drives and paper files. Each asset carries an NFC tag or QR code, so the engineer standing in front of it opens the right record with a tap instead of searching a list and hoping they have picked the right hoist.

Templates written for the equipment

Inspection templates are aligned to LOLER thorough examination and to the site's own benchmark standard. Many sites hold themselves to more than the legal minimum, and the template needs to reflect that rather than force the site to work around a generic checklist. Templates are written for each kind of asset, so a grab crane is not inspected with the same questions as a chain block.

Task by task, on the device in your hand

Inspections run task by task on iPhone and iPad. Each task asks one clear question, takes photographs where they matter and ends with a sign-off. The aim is that the inspection is finished when the engineer walks away from the crane, not when they get back to a desk to type it up. Plant rooms, crane walkways and bunker halls rarely have dependable signal, so capture works offline and syncs later, when the device is back in range.

A health score that points at the risk

Findings roll up into a crane health score for each asset and for the site as a whole. The score is not there to decorate a dashboard; it is there so that attention goes where the risk is, and so that a maintenance planner can see which cranes are trending the wrong way before an outage is scheduled rather than during it.

Secure by design

Sign-in uses a one-time code sent by email, so there are no shared passwords on site devices. Access is set per organisation and per role, so an inspection contractor sees the assets they look after, and a site manager sees the whole picture.

Where it stands

Lifting Protect is in use by CraneWave's engineers, and is available to sites through our partner pilot programme. No customer pilot has run yet. Pilot programmes are set up site by site and measured against the site's current inspection process over ninety days, so the decision to continue rests on evidence rather than on a demonstration. If you run lifting equipment and want to see whether Lifting Protect would work on your site, we would like to hear from you.