Featured in Lift Line Summer 2026
Once you spend some time around the crane business, you might start hearing the phrase, “It’s a routine lift.”
Is there really such a thing as a “routine” crane lift, though? Maybe calling some lifts “familiar” would be more appropriate. The level of planning varies by job, but even lifts that appear similar on lift day can involve very different site conditions, schedules, access points, load requirements, and customer needs. On more complex projects, planning may begin weeks or months in advance and involve coordinated teams that can include ALL personnel working closely with customers, owners, engineers, contractors, and other jobsite stakeholders.
It is within this preliminary work – long before any crane even shows up on a job site – where ALL often delivers its greatest value for customers.
As one longtime customer, Mike Paolone, vice president of Shippers Highway Express, a turnkey rigging solution for all HVAC equipment, recently described it, “I call ALL because I know, from the minute I hang up that phone, the excellence of the crane and the crane team is off my list of things to worry about. They handle everything.”
Say a customer needs a commercial-grade HVAC unit placed on a roof. Or removed from one. Maybe the building is downtown, the access tight, the schedule is unforgiving. The lift might look routine to anyone simply watching the action.
But they never see the hard work behind it.
And so it begins
To the public, the lift may be a dramatic few minutes: a crane set up in a street, a load rising above a roofline, a crew guiding it into place. To the people responsible for making the lift happen, those few minutes are the result of weeks, months, or even years of planning. It all depends on the specifics unique to each job. Whether the lift is considered large, small, common, or critical, the process depends on the same discipline.
“By the time the crane has arrived on site, a lot of decisions have already been made,” said Brian Meek, project manager for ALL Erection & Crane Rental, flagship branch of the ALL Family of Companies. “Where the crane sits, how it gets there, how it is configured, what it can pick at a given radius, what the ground conditions look like, how the load will be rigged, what the weather may do — all of that has been worked out before lift day.”
A typical project might start when an owner, contractor, or mechanical engineering company needs to move something large and heavy from one place to another. They call ALL.
The first step will be understanding the job. What is being lifted? What does it weigh? Where is it now? Where does it need to go? What obstructions are in the way? How much room is available for the crane, support equipment, trucks, counterweight, mats, rigging crew, and customer activity?
Those early questions will shape everything that follows.
For jobs like this one, the ALL team reviews the site, the load, the access, the working radius, and the customer’s schedule. In many cases, the first version of the plan is broad: what size crane may be needed, where it could be positioned, and what the lift sequence might look like. From there, the work becomes more detailed.
Designing the lift plan
"A crane plan often begins with field measurements,” said Meek. “My standard tools are two tape measurers – 35 and 100 feet – and a laser for measuring elevations. The measurements form the foundation of every plan I work on.”
Beyond a site visit, a planner such as Meek may continue to study the site, review drawings, consider ground-bearing requirements, and determine matting needs, before starting to model the lift.
“Lift planning at ALL is fueled by experience, knowledge, and creativity,” said Meek. I can grab a Google Earth image of the job site and input it into 3-D Lift Plan to work with an image of the actual location. I also have Liebherr’s LICCON [Liebherr Computed Control] and AutoCAD at my disposal. By inputting my field measurements into any of these programs, I can begin to develop a crane plan and fine tune it.”
Choosing the crane
Equipment selection is based not simply on the weight of the load, but on the total conditions surrounding the pick. A 15,000-pound unit on the ground next to the crane is not the same lift as a 15,000-pound unit on a roof, across a street, behind a parapet, with traffic closures and adjacent buildings limiting setup.
That is where lift planning becomes both technical and practical.
Planners do more than pick a crane. A single crane can offer thousands of unique combinations. Because both mobile and crawler cranes feature modular boom, jib, and counterweight setups, understanding the specific variable components is what determines safe lifting parameters.
Software helps the team visualize the crane’s position, boom length, radius, capacity, obstructions, and load path. The goal is not just to determine whether a lift can be made, but to understand how it should be made—in the safest, most efficient way to perform the work while accounting for the realities of the jobsite.
“At ALL, we’ve developed an enormous database of every crane in our fleet and every attachment,” said Meek. “Booms and jibs, of course, but also hook blocks, balls, load lines, etc. This enables us to plug various cranes into the plan, add attachments, and see how the added weight impacts our overall load.”
The lift plan is where the job starts to become real. It’s about taking what the customer needs and translating it into the crane, the setup, the configuration, and the sequence.
“ A lift plan is developed to identify the crane to be used, how it will be configured, where it will be positioned, what it will lift, how the load will be rigged, and whether the crane has the required capacity at the needed radius,” said Meek. “Still, every lift is different and every customer is different on what information they may need. If a customer needs more information, we can start adding in information like ground bearing pressure, necessary crane matting, elevations for FAA restrictions, and other detail.”
Logistics are part of the lift
Planning does not stop with the crane chart. The team will need to figure out how to get the equipment to the job site. For longer delivery distances, ALL has trucking hubs operating out of branches in Cleveland, Milwaukee, Indianapolis, and Nitro, W. Va. For local dispatches, each branch handles its own delivery.
There are plenty of administrative steps taken before a crane ever leaves the yard.
If an all-terrain crane is traveling to the site, road permits may be required. Depending on the route, those permits can involve state, county, and municipal authorities. If a street must close, the customer and project team may need to coordinate with the city, police, building owners, neighboring businesses, or event schedules. If the crane requires counterweight, boom inserts, an assist crane, or multiple support trucks, those elements must arrive in the correct order and at the correct time.
In an urban setting, these details can be as important as the lift itself. The team must account for where trucks will stage, how counterweight will be delivered, how the crane will be assembled, where mats will be placed, and how the work area will remain controlled and safe.
This planning is not unique to urban lifts. Consider what it takes to maneuver crawlers up a mountain to set wind turbines, a mobile crane needing to snake down to a riverbed to set steel for a bridge, or a telecrawler laying low under a bridge and booming up between two highway spans to set precast. These are all real scenarios with planning challenges, which is why ALL relies on its excellent bench at all levels of planning.
Weather can be another variable. Wind, rain, lightning, or poor visibility can change the plan. Backup dates may be identified. Go/no-go conversations become part of the final approach. The closer the calendar gets to lift day, the more frequent the communication becomes among ALL, the customer, rigging crews, drivers, operators, and project stakeholders.
The point is to eliminate surprises before lift day begins.
From plan to reality
One of the most important handoffs happens when the lift plan moves from the planning team to the people who will execute it in the field.
For complex or critical picks, the operator may review the plan in advance, study the setup, understand the load path, and prepare for the lift sequence before sitting in the cab. The operator still brings experience, judgment, feel, and communication to the work. Technology does not replace the craft. It supports it. A lift may last only minutes, but the operator works from a foundation built over years, often decades.
Site visits, planning meetings, lift drawings, permits, equipment selection, crane configuration, ground prep, weather checks, crew briefings, and customer coordination all converge at the moment of execution.
The ALL difference
That is why the phrase “routine lift” can be misleading. A lift may be familiar. The equipment and customer may be familiar. Each job still has its own site, and with it unique conditions and schedules, ALL’s value extends beyond providing the crane. It is in the people, processes, and problem-solving that surround the crane.
A customer makes one call because something heavy needs to move. Behind that call can follow a team of specialists: sales, project management, lift planning, engineering support, dispatch, permitting, drivers, mechanics, assembly crews, riggers, signalers, and operators. Each has a role in turning the customer’s need into a controlled lift plan.
"ALL does a lot of high-profile work and work for highprofile customers,” said Meek. “When a customer hands off a job to us in these situations, it might begin a period of back-and-forth with their own engineers. It’s a process we welcome because everyone is on the same team, working toward the same goal. If we’re scheduled to perform a lift for NASA, for example, it’s not uncommon for a planning period to take six months or more. Customers come to us expressly because they know we excel at these kinds of complex jobs.”
The lift is what everyone sees. The preparation is what makes it look easy.