While installing another goods lift up in Queensland — the great escape, I'll call it, from freezing Victoria — I got talking to many of the people passing by on site. Seeing the amount of work one person was getting through raised a few questions, and the same conversation kept coming up.
It's not just about the lifting equipment. It's the struggle to find good, quality people in this day and age.
The finished goods lift serving the mezzanine on our recent Queensland installation.
Why a goods lift is a complex product
The trouble with our industry — designing, manufacturing and installing goods lifts and materials handling equipment — is that it's a genuinely complex product. A single mezzanine goods lift like the one in the photo brings together structural steel fabrication, mechanical drive systems, electrical control panels and PLC programming, guarding and interlocked doors, and compliance with the Australian Standard for hoists — AS 1418.8. That's before you get to site work: crane lifts, working at heights, coordinating with builders and other trades on a live warehouse floor.
Each of those is a different skill and a different touch point. Very few people carry all of them, and finding the right skills, specific to the job, right when they're needed, has become one of the hardest parts of manufacturing in Australia.
The last step in the jigsaw
Then you add supply chain issues — steel lead times, componentry from overseas, freight delays — and you're standing on site as the installer, fundamentally the last step in the jigsaw. That's where all the heat comes on. Every problem that was pushed down the line — a late delivery, a dimension that changed, a penetration that isn't where the drawings said — has to get solved right there, on the spot. And not everybody is a problem solver.
That reality has shaped how I think Total Lifting Solutions has to operate.
Building a thinking business
My intent is to build Total Lifting Solutions as a thinking business. A highly capable business with limited resources — which means we have to be efficient, by design, in everything we do.
For us, that means following the principles of lean manufacturing:
- Design for simpler manufacture. Every new lift we build should be a better product that takes fewer steps, fewer specialist hands and less rework to produce than the last one.
- Don't pass inefficiency on to the customer. If a process is wasteful, the answer is to fix the process — not to overcharge the customer to cover it.
- Solve problems at the source. The fewer surprises that reach the installation stage, the smoother that last step in the jigsaw becomes — for us and for the builders and warehouse operators we work with.
- Keep evolving. Every install, including this Queensland one, teaches us something that goes back into the next design.
What this means if you're buying a goods lift
For our customers — warehouse operators, builders and manufacturers across Australia — a thinking business means a goods lift that's engineered to AS 1418.8, manufactured efficiently here in Victoria, and installed by the same people who built it. No finger-pointing between a seller, a factory and an installer: one team carries the job from drawings to handover, and the problem solver on site is the person who knows the machine inside out.
A question for fellow manufacturers
And I'll leave you with the question I found myself discussing up in Queensland: how are you finding manufacturing — and finding the right skills — in this day and age? I'd genuinely like to hear how other Australian manufacturers are handling it.
Total Lifting Solutions designs, manufactures and installs goods lifts, freight hoists and workstation cranes from our Hallam, Victoria facility, delivering Australia-wide. If you're planning a mezzanine goods lift or need advice on moving materials between levels, get in touch — we're always happy to talk through the job.