Stretching out

The facility has a high level of automation but there are some jobs that still require a human touch.
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On a surprisingly gloomy December morning PMV receives a call. Someone’s just built the biggest EOT or gantry crane ever assembled in the UAE. It’s a phone call that demands a visit.

Compared to its fellow
Emirates, the second most northerly Emirate Umm Al Quwain feels a much more spacious and industrial place as PMV makes its way off the Emirates Road.

A visitor to Dubai or Abu Dhabi could stay in both, experience the restaurants, malls and beaches without ever passing through the dusty and busy climes of Jebel Ali or Mussafah. Not so the grittier Umm Al Quwain, with its massive cement works and oil and gas plants dominating the horizon. In many ways it is the Hamburg or Guangzhou to the Berlin and Hong Kong of Abu Dhabi and Dubai.

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It’s a location that is particularly fitting for a company like Lootah Lemmens Crane Systems. The company is a fully functioning marriage of the northern European engineering expertise of Lemmens, the Dutch overhead crane specialist and the local knowledge of UAE conglomerate Lootah Group.

Since the JV’s inception in 2005 the company has made serious in-roads into the crane market in the GCC, providing EOT (electric overhead train) crane fabrication services from its purpose-built facility in Umm Al Quwain.

Ashish Goyal, general manager at Lootah Lemmens, explains that it was started when Lemmens realised that it needed a physical presence – more exactly a fabrication facility – to compete in the region. A sales presence simply wasn’t enough.

“It’s a 49/51 split between the two (with Lootah owning the bigger share),” he says. “Lootah is one of the biggest names here and Lemmens have been making cranes for 40 years (since 1969). So it’s a winning combination.”

Goyal has enjoyed the fruits of this relationship drawing on the architects of both companies to develop Lootah Lemmens. In fact Abdullah Lootah and John Lemmens were instrumental in providing the impetus in constructing the facility in Umm Al Quwain.

John Lemmens in particular has been pro-active in guiding the first five years of the company. “John and I shared a vision of where we thought the company could go.”

Although only open for two years, the Umm al Quwain facility has proven to be a pivotal piece in the companies jigsaw, uniting its different aspects like design, production and aftersales under one roof. The facility can cover a complete range from manually operated cranes to fully automatic cranes, from 200kg to 500 tons capacities, explains Goyal.

LL’s approach to design and fabrication is typical for the industry at large but almost unique in the GCC. For a start it’s highly process driven – a systematic approach that follows from sales to specification, design, final production, delivery and aftersales.