Back in the 90s, my father repaired the roof of the church porch in Busturia. But he ran into a problem: the lorry carrying the material could not get there to unload. The usual answer was to hire a large crane. Expensive and cumbersome to set up.
His answer: take the crane arm off the lorry and mount it on my uncle’s tractor. The same system that drove the rotavator could drive the crane’s hydraulics.
That day the crane tractor was born.
In companies we should apply the same philosophy:
- Get away from large, monolithic, cumbersome systems that force you to adapt to them.
- Back modular tools, ones that are deployed and adapted to each case.
- Have a team that can analyse the processes, understand the problem and apply ingenuity to solve it.
The large crane would have solved it. But the best answer was close at hand: a tool that could be adapted and someone who saw it.
So, do you need a crane tractor?