EWP & Crane Certification for Equipment Hire Fleets

Compliance as a core part of the hire product

When a hire company supplies plant, it must ensure so far as is reasonably practicable that the equipment is without risks to health and safety. That duty does not end at the gate — it extends to the condition in which plant is dispatched. Customers, principal contractors and site inductors increasingly demand current inspection documentation before a unit is admitted to site, and a hire company that cannot produce it loses the hire.

Independent certification gives a hire company an unimpeachable answer: every dispatched unit carries a current, engineer-signed inspection record, and the fleet register proves it. This protects the business and turns compliance into a competitive advantage rather than a cost centre.

• PCBU duty to supply plant without risks follows the equipment to site
• Customers and site inductors demand current inspection records
• Independent certification removes any conflict-of-interest perception
• A clean fleet register wins hires and protects the brand

Managing a large, mixed and constantly moving fleet

Hire fleets are the hardest environment in which to maintain compliance, precisely because units are constantly on the move. A machine may be on hire when its annual inspection falls due, or transferred between branches, and without disciplined tracking its due date is easily missed. The mix of scissor lifts, boom lifts, telehandlers and cranes each carries a different inspection cadence and standard, compounding the challenge.

We maintain a consolidated fleet register showing the live compliance status of every asset — current, due soon, overdue or grounded — so branch and fleet managers can plan inspections around utilisation and never dispatch a non-compliant unit. This register is the single source of truth the business can rely on and produce on demand.

Log book servicing and routine maintenance verification

Between annual inspections, EWPs require log book servicing at the manufacturer's specified intervals, and a hire fleet accumulates hours fast. We carry out log book servicing to keep units within their maintenance schedule and to preserve the continuity of the maintenance record, which underpins both compliance and residual value at resale.

Keeping the log book complete and current also matters at the ten-year major inspection, where a well-maintained unit with a clean history typically passes more smoothly than one with gaps that must be investigated.

The ten-year major inspection across the fleet

Every EWP in the fleet faces a major inspection at ten years from manufacture under AS 2550.10, and for a large hire company these milestones arrive continuously. Planning them is a fleet-management exercise: a unit that hits ten years without a completed major inspection is unhireable, which is dead capital sitting in the yard. We forecast major-inspection due dates across the fleet so the business can schedule them proactively and keep utilisation high.

Fleet compliance audits and pre-purchase inspections

As fleets grow through acquisition and used purchases, a fleet compliance audit reconciles the physical fleet against records, surfaces any unit that has drifted out of certification, and produces a prioritised rectification plan. When acquiring used plant or a competitor's fleet, a pre-purchase inspection establishes true condition and remaining service life before capital is committed, protecting the buyer from inheriting undisclosed defects or imminent major-inspection costs.