Managing Director and founder of Titan Lifting Technologies, Ian Allan, expands on the company’s extensive lifting products and its point of difference when it comes to quality control.
Loop back to the 1970s and Ian Allan was doing his time working as a national sales manager for Robert Bosch power tools.
With a penchant for equipment and a commitment to quality, Ian was steadily building his way into a career in power tools until a lifting equipment company came knocking on the door to poach him to be marketing manager of its operations.
From that point, by his own admission, he just fell in love with the industry of lifting equipment.
“At the end of the day, nearly everything that you think about and use requires some piece of lifting equipment,” he says. “It’s multi-faceted, it’s dynamic, and high quality equipment that is integral to people’s lives.”
Founded in 1998 as Allan Marketing Group but known colloquially as Titan Lifting, Titan’s journey began back in 1974 when founder and current Managing Director, Ian Allan, moved from tools manufacturing with Bosch to working
with an international lifting equipment company, Columbus McKinnon (CM) USA.
From there, his investment in passion for high quality, safe, reliable lifting equipment organically grew, resulting in the development of Titan Lifting Technologies.
From his time at CM then PWB Anchor (now Kito PWB), Ian became well acquainted with the international lifting equipment market and set his sights on expanding the company beyond the Australian market; today, headed up by himself and Chief Operating Officer, John Di Michele, the company sees its products distributed worldwide, prevalent throughout Asia and reaching as far as South Africa and the USA – such is the quality of the products Titan distributes. For Ian, the differentiation between Titan’s products when compared to some of its competitors is apparent.
“The differentiation, in our opinion, is that lifting equipment is nothing to play with; it’s very serious gear that has fatal consequences if it’s not used correctly,” says Ian. “At Titan, all the products that we supply to the lifting industry are all fully compliant and meet International as well as Australian standards.”
“Lifting is a dangerous game – you’re not playing with toys, you’re talking about heavy loads being lifted by heavy pieces of equipment, and we take that very seriously,” he continues. “We comprehensively test our products to the point of destruction because we view it as our responsibility to ensure any manufacturing, design, or labelling defects are caught by us so that, at the end of the day, every one can go home safely after work to their lives.”
At the forefront of Titan’s lifting equipment is the extensive range of precision hoisting and lifting equipment that it designs and develops using its 50 years of expertise in the industry.
Marketed under the Titan Lifting & AMG brand names, the products include hoists, girder trolleys, lifting clamps, wire rope winches, G80 and G100 chains and fittings, wire rope, synthetic slings, lashings and tie downs, shackles, rigging hardware, stainless steel rigging and weighing systems.
Furthermore, on top of its own designing and manufacturing of lifting technologies, Titan has also made moves to ensure it stays at the top of the market when it comes to supplying lifting equipment through a range of international brands that it partners with, including: Van Beest – Green Pin (Netherlands) and its shackles, globally renowned height equipment specialist Tractel (France) and its original Tirfor winch, civil construction lifting gear company Probst (Germany), automated hydraulic testers, wire rope swaging machines and wire rope ferrules from Wirop (Taiwan) and Caldwell – Renfroe (USA) lifting equipment and plate clamps.
Image: Prime Creative Media
Titan’s diverse range of Australian and International Standards-compliant designed and imported lifting gear seeks to cover any industry that may require lifting equipment to support its operations; and, through its extensive customer base, it demonstrates that it does exactly that.
Today, the lifting equipment specialist sees its products distributed to a range of different industries from mining through to everyday construction, with colossal companies such as McConnell Dowell, Rio Tinto, Essential Energy, BHP and BlueScope representing just some of the repeat customers calling for Titan’s specialised lifting equipment.
“At the centre of our product range is a commitment to providing more than just consumables; the lifting gear that we provide is all very high-end, technical gear that is designed to last for a long time, rather than being discarded after one or two uses,” says Ian.
“Our products are thriving across all sectors and have been used in events such as Cirque-du-Soleil, to lifting two-tonne road barriers, to providing the heavy-duty shackles needed for major lifting in construction across the renewables, mining and infrastructure sectors.”
As mentioned, Titan ensures its products are compliant with both Australian and International Standards; compliance, however, is only the tip of the iceberg for the international lifting equipment specialist. At its base in Melbourne’s northern suburbs, Titan Lifting operates two warehouses: one for incoming stock, and one for outgoing stock.
When a product initially arrives at its facilities, Titan quarantines the shipment in the first warehouse until it is comprehensively tested and inspected, ensuring that any product entering the lifting equipment market will do exactly what it says it will do. For Titan, this is enhanced by its partnership with Wirop, another international relationship the company has leant on to deliver an automated hydraulic tester.
Titan also has a vertical tester designed specifically for electric and manual hoists. All lifting and lashing products undergo the required load testing relative to their respective Standard. Once a shipment has passed Titan’s rigid QC, relevant test documentation is filed according to batch numbers.
This not only proves the products’ compliance but permanently files records for future reference and traceability. After QC, products are then moved to Titan’s second warehouse, where they are ready to be shipped out to its extensive range of customers.
“The products arrive here with test certificates from our manufacturers, along with material and heat treatment certification, all the things we require to make us comfortable that they’ve done it right,” says Ian. “But to be even more certain, we conduct our own extensive testing. Nothing goes out the door until it’s tested by us.”
Further compounding Titan’s commitment to the stringent compliance in the lifting industry is its LEEA membership status.
Highlighting Titan’s involvement as “one of the earliest members” of the organisation in Australia, Ian says LEEA’s specialised training on lifting equipment reflects Titan Lifting’s attitude to safety in the industry.
“LEEA has always been in and around the end-users and government departments to get them all on board in acknowledging the severity and high- stakes nature of lifting equipment,” says Ian.
“LEEA is completing a lot of important work around certification of skills because misuse can happen across the industry; LEEA is about stamping it out to ensure lifting equipment is adequately manufactured, certified and used, and that’s something that Titan Lifting Technologies supports 100 per cent.