For overhead crane builders

AI quoting for overhead crane manufacturers.

Give it the customer's crane specification and drawings. It lists every requirement that changes the price, each with its page number, shows where the document disagrees with itself, and drafts the first quote in your own pricing logic. Your estimator checks it and decides the number.

Book a Demo How we test it →

From a public 27-page crane specification

p.9One sentence asks for nuclear rules of construction, ASME NOG-1, on a crane in a dam.
p.5The trolley and the bridge are moved by pull chains today. Only the speeds table says the job is a rebuild.
p.23Test weights of 200,000 and 250,000 pounds are required for the load test.

Is the nuclear sentence a requirement, or was it left over from a template? Only the engineer can say, so it reaches your estimator as a question, not as a guess.

What one crane specification holds

On a custom crane, most of the quote is reading.

We read one public crane specification line by line, twice. It is Section 41 22 13.13, Bridge Cranes, for the 100 ton crane in the gate tower of Clearwater Dam in Missouri, issued by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. This reading was done by a person, for our guide.

27

Pages in the crane section

43

Standards it cites

31

Submittals the government must approve

3

Sentences that could double the price

The three sentences are on pages 6, 9 and 23, and none of them describes the crane. Page 9 asks for nuclear rules of construction. Page 6 asks for capacity calculations on the building, with a professional engineer's stamp. Page 23 sets the test weights. None of them is in a price book, because none of them is a property of your crane. They belong to this document, for this job.

The same section also asks for things this crane cannot have: a receptacle in the cab of a crane that is run from a pendant, a wind alarm on a crane that sits indoors, and bumpers for two cranes on a runway that has one. Someone has to tell a real requirement from a line the template left behind.

Video: Risk Register Example: One Sentence on Page 9 of a Crane Specification (4:22)

Read the whole specification with us, page by page →How to weigh these before you bid →

The whole document, not only the capacity

Every part of the request settles a different part of the price.

Mavlon reads all of it together, because the answers are not in one place and not in one form. Each example below is from a public document, with its page.

The description of the crane

Capacity, service class, speeds and environment. The class drives the gears, bearings, motors and brakes.

The speeds table on page 5 lists the trolley and the bridge as manual today. That table is the only place that tells you the job is a rebuild of an existing crane.

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 27 pages

The list of standards

Which rules your design, your welding and your electrical work must follow.

The first three pages name 43 publications. One of them, CMAA Specification 70, is cited in its 2010 edition in a document dated 2018.

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 27 pages

Testing and acceptance

The size of the brake and the drive, and a test that somebody has to stage.

Page 9 sets the load test at 125 percent of rated load with a tolerance of plus 5 percent, which works out to 131.25 percent. Page 23 asks for test weights of 200,000 and 250,000 pounds.

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 27 pages

Submittals and people

Hours and calendar time before anything is built.

There are 31 submittals that need government approval. Test procedures are due at least 90 days before any test, and page 8 asks for a manufacturer with at least ten years of specialised experience.

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 27 pages

The amendments

What changed, and what the change left behind.

Amendment 0001 changed the trolley and bridge drives to two speed control. Page 14 still carries a sentence that only makes sense for the drives it replaced.

U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, 27 pages

The price schedule and the general sections

The shape of your answer, and costs that have no crane in them.

At Grand Coulee the price schedule on page B-1 has four lines, and another section makes the contractor keep two 100 ton mobile cranes on site for the whole outage.

Bureau of Reclamation, 452 pages

What your estimator gets

AI quoting for overhead cranes, as a reading you can check line by line.

Four kinds of line come back. The examples are from our own reading of the public Clearwater Dam specification, which is published in full with page numbers.

01

Every requirement that changes the price

Each one carries the page it came from, so checking it takes seconds instead of a search.

p.23Test weights of 200,000 and 250,000 pounds for the load test.

02

Whose it is

Yours, the owner's or another contractor's. The section is written to the contractor, not to the crane builder.

p.6Capacity calculations for the floor and roof slabs and the beams under them, with a professional engineer's stamp.

03

Questions for the engineer

Where the document asks for something that cannot apply, the question is written out. Nothing is quietly dropped and nothing is quietly priced.

p.9Is ASME NOG-1 required on this crane, or is the sentence left over from another job?

04

Services you price in days

Tests, training and site visits, pulled out of the prose so they reach the quote.

p.26Six hours of training and three sets of manuals. Before that, a rehearsal of the load test and then the witnessed one.

Then the quote

A first draft, priced from your own rules: your rates, your formulas and your past quotes, exported in your own quote format. The clarifications list carries every judgement into the quotation, and the margin stays with you.

What it does not do

It does not create drawings, and it does not fill in the customer's forms. It does not decide whether the nuclear sentence is a mistake. It puts the question in front of your estimator. It does not decide your margin, and it does not decide whether you bid.

Not a configurator

A configurator starts from your catalogue. Mavlon starts from the customer's document.

Custom work

Mavlon is the right tool when

The request is an engineer's specification, written for one crane in one building.
The job is a rebuild of an existing crane, and the document says so only in a table.
The section was written from a template, and it asks for things this crane cannot have.
The test, the test weights and the calculations for the building are yours, and none of them is in your price book.
An amendment changed a few sentences and left the paragraphs around them.

Catalogue work

A configurator or a price list is the right tool when

The enquiry is a capacity, a span and a lift height, and a standard crane covers it.
You sell the same packaged cranes and hoists again and again.
The customer has no specification of their own.
What you are short of is speed on repeat work.

We make Mavlon, so weigh this sort with that in mind. If most of your quotes are standard cranes from a catalogue, a configurator or a good price list will serve you better than we will, and we would rather say so now. Corrections are welcome at atishay@mavlon.co.

Do not take our word for it

Test it on a crane specification that is public.

The Clearwater Dam crane section is a public document. Hand it to any vendor, including us, and see whether the software finds these without being told where to look.

That the job is a rebuild of an existing crane, from the speeds table on page 5.
The ASME NOG-1 sentence on page 9, raised as a question and not priced in silence.
The load test at 125 percent on page 9, and the test weights of 200,000 and 250,000 pounds on page 23.
The capacity calculations for the building on page 6, with a professional engineer's stamp.
The lines that cannot apply to this crane: the cab receptacle on page 19, and the two cranes on one runway on page 12.

Score it the way you would score a new hire. Did it find the item? Did it cite the page? Did it ask the question, or quietly pick a side?

The full reading of this specification →Our pilot protocol and pass bar →

What we have published so far

A 179-page public waterfront package: 214 statements, each cited to its page, and 7 places where the drawings and the specification disagree.
A 668-page treatment plant specification book: the 14 sections relevant to the equipment, found without being told where to look.
No published run on a crane specification yet. The crane reading on this page was done by a person, for our guide.
The fair test is a quote of your own that you have already priced.

The pass bar: seven of ten totals within 15 percent, agreed in writing first.

We did the reading first

Guides and a tool for people who quote cranes.

GuideOverhead bridge crane specificationsA 100 ton dam crane, 27 pages, read line by line.GuidePre bid risk assessmentA risk register read from the customer's document, page by page.GuideQuoting custom equipment before the design existsWhat three public bid packages had in common.GuideReading bid packagesWhat five real public packages taught us.GuideQuote turnaround timeWhere the days go in a 21 day bid window.ToolSpecification compliance matrixAn Excel template for answering a specification line by line.

What does AI quoting for overhead cranes look like in practice?

The software reads the documents your customer sent: the crane specification, the drawings, the price schedule and any amendments. It lists every requirement that changes the price with the page it came from, sorts whose scope each one is, shows where the document disagrees with itself, and drafts a first quote from your own pricing rules. Your estimator reviews it and decides the price.

Is Mavlon a crane configurator?

No. It works from the opposite end. A configurator starts from a model of your cranes and prices the options somebody selects. Mavlon starts from the customer's documents and works out what is being asked for, which on a custom crane is the part nobody has a model for. If you already price standard cranes in a configurator, that stays where it is.

Does it work for rebuilds and modernisations, or only for new cranes?

Both. A rebuild is often the harder document, because the specification describes the crane that will exist and you have to find out what is there today. In the public Clearwater Dam specification, the only sign that the job is a rebuild is the speeds table on page 5.

Does it know crane standards such as CMAA 70?

It reads which standards the document cites, and in which edition, and lists them with their pages. It does not replace your engineer's knowledge of those standards. The Clearwater Dam specification cites 43 publications, and it cites CMAA Specification 70 in the 2010 edition in a document dated 2018.

How do we find out whether it works on our quotes?

Bring a quote you have already priced. The pilot is a blind test on your own past quotes, scored against a pass bar that is agreed in writing before anything runs. The whole protocol is published on our pilot page. Read the pilot protocol.

Who sees our customers' specifications?

An NDA is signed before any document of yours moves. Deployment options, encryption and the controls that keep your documents out of model training are set out on our security page. Read the security page.

Questions crane builders ask

Asked plainly, answered in writing.

Bring one crane package you have already priced.

We read it together on a call. Compare what it finds against what your team found. If you would rather not share a document on day one, we can read the public crane specification together instead. An NDA is signed before anything of yours moves.

The newsletter

Field Notes

The numbers that change your next quote. Once a month.

01A material price that shifted this month, with the number.
02What contracts in one segment actually closed for.
03A real bid package taken apart page by page.