Deciding to use industrial maintenance scaffolding (often called plant maintenance scaffolding) in South Africa is a crucial decision for companies seeking a return on investment. In South Africa, five factors require consideration. These factors include availability, reliability, maintainability, safety and cost.
The availability of physical scaffolding and people with the required certifications to provide these services is a critical factor to consider. In providing plant maintenance scaffolding both physical scaffolding and skilled operators are in place at the plant. This allows plant managers to respond rapidly to tasks arising out of wear and tear on the plant, but more importantly to responding to events and circumstances that may lead to longer outages.
Another important reason is supporting the maintenance schedules. The availability of scaffolding ensures that routine maintenance tasks are facilitated without delays in ordering and sourcing scaffolding. This reason is often neglected but extends the overall lifespan of the plant and reduces downtime in future.
The availability of scaffolding and certified personnel to undertake operations depends on the broader state of the economy. However, especially in downtimes having a team providing regular scaffolding on plants is important as it provides an opportunity for conducting repairs and longer term maintenance projects. The benefits of having a team available outweighs searching for new contractors even in downtimes. As the construction industry and the broader South African economy recovers from the Covid 19 pandemic, the case of having dedicated industrial scaffolding capacity is clearer because growing demand means prices are likely to rise and limited scaffolding resources will be stretched.
This means that the management of the plant can safely delegate scaffolding to a skilled team with clear accountability channels.
The availability of a skilled teams with the requisite scaffolding is certainly a major plus for industrial plants. Having these teams and physical scaffolds on site however brings another element of reliability. This element is that the maintenance and repair of scaffolding equipment will be done by a dedicated team, and this allows the plant to focus on conducting repairs and maintenance.
Specifically, the team from Pro Rise Scaffolding ensures that the scaffolding equipment and structures are regularly maintained. This includes cleaning, storing and replacement of scaffolding. When our team does this, our clients are free to focus on the important aspects of undertaking repairs, doing routine maintenance and conducting inspections of machinery.
The team at the plant further benefits from a set of maintenance related factors. At Pro Rise Scaffolding we call it maintainability (yes, that is a real word). The partnerships we have with plants show us that having long term relationships means that we are able to:
When it comes to using scaffolding, safety is an essential part of the process. The most common causes of accidents with scaffolding is that employees don’t read the safety information and training that’s included with the scaffolding and end up working with it without proper training and experience. As experienced operators with all the required certifications, Pro Rise Scaffolding ensures the safety of workers and equipment.
Pro Rise Scaffolding does not compete aggressively on price. We are open to healthy negotiations on prices, but will never reduce our fee to the point where we are cutting corners. In offering a fair competitive price we believe that our clients will not be able to provide the same service in house at a lower price. The costs of purchasing scaffolding and hiring temporary staff to implement scaffolding are high cost items, not only in terms of money but also in terms of the ‘management overhead’ which is just another way of saying in Afrikaans “a kop suur”.