4 Ways Proper Maintenance Increases Your Crane’s Resale Price

As the owner of a crane business, you’ve invested a lot of time, labor, and money into your fleet. You do it all to keep your cranes up and running as long as possible, but eventually, it will be time to resell them to the next owner. Having the right crane maintenance program in place ensures that, when that time comes, you’ll get the most money back possible.

What Is a Crane Maintenance Program?

A crane is a big investment and properly maintaining it can help you get the most bang for your buck. Unlike a maintenance schedule, which details when specific preventive maintenance tasks will be performed, a crane maintenance program lays the foundation for how to keep your crane running at its best.

A few tasks to include in your crane maintenance program are:

• Part lubrication to reduce friction
• Cleaning components to reduce corrosion
• Checking electronics such as lights, displays, and signals
• Replacing parts at regular intervals

Another key component of a crane maintenance program is documenting all of the tasks that your crew has performed. This will ensure that no duties have gone overlooked and demonstrate your compliance in the event of an inspection. Comprehensive maintenance documentation can also validate insurance claims and minimize liability, helping reduce your total insurance costs.

Ryan Goebel, a former 20-year crane rental project manager, now serves as a software advisor at Visual Dispatch, part of the RapidWorks product family.

We spoke with Ryan Goebel, who was a crane rental project manager for 20 years and is now a software advisor with Visual Dispatch, part of the RapidWorks’ product family.

“Maintaining an up-to-date digital record of all repairs and inspections that are performed by field personnel and having them in an accessible place, gives you the opportunity to take your data and apply it to your equipment lifecycle evaluations,” Goebel shared.

Want more details and tips to build your maintenance program? Check out RapidWorks’ Ultimate Guide to Heavy Equipment Maintenance.

The Top 4 Benefits of a Crane Maintenance Program

An effective crane maintenance program doesn’t just save you money when it’s time to sell your crane — it drives value throughout the life of its operation, too. Here are four major benefits that a quality crane maintenance program brings to the table.

1. Maximized Crane Resale Value

Whether you’re buying or selling heavy equipment, you know that the first factor you consider is condition. A proactive maintenance program keeps your crane in the best possible condition inside and out, ensuring that all components are operational.

While the exact numbers will vary in each case, a well-maintained crane will retain much more value than one that was neglected. A crane maintenance program ensures that your team completes all of the workflows needed to keep your crane in top condition, maximizing its resale value at the end of its life.

2. Higher Fleet Productivity

A well-run maintenance program keeps your crane performing at its best. While maintenance schedules simply provide timelines for specific maintenance tasks, maintenance programs are more detailed and ensure that your crane is maintained according to best practices. By following all manufacturers’ guidelines as laid out in your maintenance program, you can find and fix minor issues before they become major ones. This ensures that your crane will perform better when it’s out in the field, and spend more time on-site instead of the repair shop — which means more time making you money.

3. Reduced Costs

Minor repairs are easier and cheaper to fix than major ones. A proper mobile crane maintenance program helps identify problems in your machinery early on, while maintenance schedules are less thorough, causing some issues to fall through the cracks. Having a comprehensive maintenance program lets you find and fix small problems before they compound into bigger ones. That saves you money in the long run, reducing the total cost of running your fleet.

4. Longer Equipment Life

The added detail of crane maintenance programs keeps minor issues from turning into bigger ones, and that extends the life of your crane. Proper maintenance reduces the wear and tear that important components endure, allowing your crane to go the distance. This also prolongs the amount of time you have before you’ll need to make an expensive new crane purchase.

“It’s a great benefit to have an enterprise solution that gives you everything you need to make your business successful, all in one place, so that at the end of a quarter or end of the year, you can take a broader evaluation of the overhead costs of your equipment,” Goebel added. “When you align that with other data that can be provided through an enterprise solution, you’ll get a more full picture of what that crane is costing you relative to previous years so that you can make a better determination of where that equipment piece is in its life cycle. This helps you determine its value to you as a company and whether it’s time to sell or replace that equipment.”

Why Crane Resale Value Matters

As a heavy-duty piece of equipment, your crane may last 20 years or more — but nothing lasts forever. Eventually, you’ll need to retire that crane from your fleet, and selling it off to another crane business can offset the expense of buying a new one. Your crane’s resale value is the amount of money you can expect to get back from selling your crane at the end of its life, and it plays a key role in calculating your crane’s lifetime value.

The primary factor that determines your heavy equipment’s value is its condition. The resale value of a crane that’s in good condition could cover a good chunk of its original cost, while one with large amounts of corrosion or damage would be worth much less at the time of resale.

Proper upkeep maintains a crane’s condition over its lifetime, which is why crane maintenance programs are so important.

Visit rapidworks.com to discover how you can maximize and protect your crane’s resale value.