Crane Company Lifts Heavy Industry With Cutting Edge Tech

Tue January 15, 2019
RedList LLC

Most people aren't concerned with the processes and equipment that build the world around them. It's certainly uncommon for people to stop and smell the "asphalt" and consider the machines and manpower required to construct the roads they drive on, the buildings they work in or even think about the facilities that manufacture the items in their home or office. But for RedList LLC (RedList), the tech that powers heavy industry is all they think about.

Founded in the heart of Utah's Silicon Slopes, RedList stands as tribute to the fusion of heavy equipment and software that intersects today's construction and manufacturing companies.

"A lot of people ask us why we aren't chasing sexier industries, but really, what's more exciting than building the tech that builds the world?" said John Keller, president of RedList. "We joke around that it may take a village to raise a child, but it takes a lot of people and machines to raise a village."

Building software that services a broad range of medium and heavy equipment industries is a big undertaking and RedList has worked with other innovative heavy equipment companies, like Wagstaff Crane, its Utah neighbor, to do just that.

Building something big is exactly what Wagstaff Crane does best. The three-generation, family-owned Utah business is planning to increase its lead as the Mountain West's premier crane company. The Wagstaff leadership team has invested years of time and significant financial resources into developing its own technology and finding best-in-class systems to integrate into its management platforms.

These efforts led Wagstaff Crane to collaborate with RedList, to develop the type of tools that help heavy equipment operators and their back-office counterparts improve efficiency and scale without sacrificing any of the critical safety protocols vital to their business.

For a crane company like Wagstaff, safety is a critical part of the business. An incident on the job for a subcontractor like Wagstaff reflects directly on the General Contractor or business that the contractor is working for.

"Our customers depend on us to keep their workplace environments safe and organized," said Ron Wagstaff, CEO of Wagstaff Crane. "Our safety record becomes part of the history of the customers we service and so we go through great lengths to ensure that we are compliant and properly record all of our safety behaviors."

For Wagstaff this has meant working with RedList's software to digitize every safety form and provide workers and management full transparency to view those completed forms.

"A lot of people don't realize the impact that compliance with safety forms can actually have on their business," said Dallen Davenport, client services manager of RedList."

Workers are more aware of company initiatives, support staff are better able to catch potential safety and equipment hazards well before they happen, and productivity and profitability dramatically increase."

Safety is only the beginning, as the internet of things (IoT) picks up pace in other industries, Wagstaff recognizes the need to be ready for IoT in the crane industry.

Wagstaff explained, "In the next 10 to 20 years, I'm confident we'll see sensors integrated into all of our equipment and the equipment we're lifting. We need a platform to integrate all of this data and tie it into our best practices so management can leverage it for the benefit of our customers. That's why we started using RedList — we need to prepare now, for the future that we know is coming."

In some sense, the relationship between RedList and Wagstaff Crane reflects a lot of the momentum people in Utah are experiencing right now. As the booming Utah tech economy continues to generate more jobs, more businesses are building to keep up with the growth, translating into more opportunities for construction-related businesses who in turn are adopting more technology to keep up.

"It's a virtuous cycle," said Casey Pettingill, CEO of Red Pepper Software. "There's not a better place to be in tech and construction than the state of Utah."

For more information, visit wagstaffcrane.com and yourredlist.com.