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6th March 2008 Low-level access for all areas

Braviisol's Leonardo personnel lift heralds a rebirth in low-level work at height.

• Platform height - elevated 2.9 m
• Platform height - lowered 0.55 m
• Maximum working height 4.9 m
• Base width 0.76 m
• Base length 1.22 m
• Stowed height 1.69 m
• Weight 450 kg
• Gradeability 40 per cent

If the definition of a renaissance man is someone who is skilled at a wide variety of tasks then a renaissance company should combine at least a manufacturing arm, maybe service provision, possibly contracting as well.

Although hailing from the heartland of the renaissance, Italian access manufacturer Braviisol (Bravi for short), by its own admission, falls some way short of this description.

The company boasts a small contracting arm, installing partitions and ceilings, but it is in the role of manufacturer that it hopes to make its mark.

Bravi the manufacturer has forsaken the temptation to spread its net wide and has put all its eggs in one basket - the hitherto under-exploited niche for low-level powered access.

Yet in spite of this limited horizon, Bravi has looked to the renaissance and its poster boy, Leonardo da Vinci, for inspiration in the name of its signature product. The company claims its Leonardo self-propelled personnel lift is unique in the market and will herald a renaissance in the way we conduct low-level work at height. But is the company's approach a stroke of Italian genius, or is it just another example of Italian vanity?

Great potential

The answer depends on how you perceive the potential for such a machine in the currently underdeveloped sector of powered access for low-level work at height. In Bravi's case it is its own - experience as a small-scale finishing-trades contractor that has led it to the conclusion that this is the place to be.

Marina Torres, Bravi's sales director, explains. "The company was founded in late 1970s as an installer of plasterboard partitions and ceilings. We started producing platforms only when we realised we needed them for our own construction sites. Our company was relatively small - we only had 100 workers and we wanted to increase output without increasing the workforce."

It was this eternal pursuit of improved productivity that was the catalyst for the company's diversification into the production of access platforms.

"We rapidly understood that we could grow this business more than our traditional contracting arm so the production of access platforms became our main activity," she continues. "We still have an installation arm, but platforms now take up almost all of our energy."

The transformation from mainly contractor to mainly manufacturer began in the late 1980s, although it took a while for the company to hit on what was to become its most important product - the Lui Mini, now renamed the Leonardo. "This was introduced in 1995 and it was the time we began to realise this was to be our key product."

Even then, it still took the best part of a decade for the company and the product to begin to realise its potential. "Things didn't really take off until after our attendance at Bauma 2004," she says. "We only went with the Leonardo. We had a very positive response and this made us realise, with the breadth of products on offer elsewhere, that the best plan for growth as a manufacturer was to concentrate on a unique market with a unique product, so we focused on low-level powered access and have put all our technical development and marketing effort into the Leonardo since then."

The result, according to Ms Torres, is a machine set to define a new niche in powered access.

"If you look at the specifications of other machines you realise there are lots of models and lots of different manufacturers but, wherever you look, there's nothing as complete as the Leonardo. It's the perfect compromise between a scaffold tower or a podium step and a mini-scissor lift for low-level powered access."

The machine is far from a compromise, insists Andrew Fishburn, joint managing director of Bravi's new dealership Bravi UK. Rather, it is the conclusion of a process of evolution.

"You've still got people, let's admit it, balancing on orange crates. The next step is the people who've progressed to using something like podium steps," explains Mr Fishburn. "They're much better but they've still got their limitations, especially when it comes to productivity.

Highly evolved

"Push-around lifts are the next level up," he adds. "They've been around in the US for the past 15-20 years and have worked reasonably well here, too, though we don't use pick-up trucks so much in the UK so they're not quite so easy to transport. "Then there's scissor lifts, that since the requirement to be CE-marked have had to become much heavier - they are very good but limited in terms of where they can go because of their weight. The latest stage is the pop-up, but anything that's not mobile effectively encourages people to overreach or to have an operative on the ground to push you along while you're raised up. The Leonardo is self-propelled."

Specific design

Ms Torres adds that the catalyst for this evolution was the way the machine developed. "The most important difference for our machine is that it wasn't designed by an engineer - it was designed by one of our installers from our contracting arm. It was designed specifically to meet their needs. Other machines are either too big or too heavy or have a turning radius that's too wide."

The result, she claims, is something new to the market. "The Leonardo is something totally new on a construction site. It's like discovering air-conditioning in a car. It takes time for the market to appreciate it but once you've had it you'd never choose to do without it.

"The overall context is safety - this is the first reason people are interested in the machine," adds Ms Torres. "But the real reason for its success is how the machine can enhance productivity. Just consider inspection work undertaken with a scaffolding tower: what would have taken two workers one day to do by the time the scaffolding has been unloaded from the van and then erected may now only take one worker half a day to do, which makes it four times more efficient. Even if the customer has rented the machine rather than buying it outright, think of the savings won from not paying a day's labour."

Productivity is not just good news for the bosses, insists Mr Fishburn. "Operators are excited about it. I've had people telling me it's a machine that's changed their lives. I spoke to one guy in his fifties working in the service tunnels under T5. There are miles of tunnels and he was doing painting touch-up work. He used to have to get up and down a scaffold tower and push it around but he said the Leonardo had saved his knees so much grief and he'd saved so much time and effort. Then he said, 'Watch this', and he got in the machine, raised it up, dipped his paint brush in his bucket and just drove off. He didn't know who I was, and this is far from a unique reaction."

Mr Fishburn and his fellow joint managing director at Bravi UK, Stuart Honeywood can add their own experiences from running Wizard Workspace until it was sold to Lavendon last year to confirm the demand this type of response can generate.

Word of mouth

"We introduced the Leonardo as the Wiz when we were in charge of Wizard," recalls Mr Honeywood.

"We'd evaluated the product for a good six months before introducing the first machine in February 2007. By the end of October we had 240. All this was achieved without marketing the product - it was just word of mouth on job sites and through our existing customer base rather than through seeking new customers. This kind of response shows that it's right for operators."

Having now jumped to the other side of the fence as dealers rather than customers, the pair are now assessing the wider market potential. "There's a population of 100,000 scaffolding towers in the UK, maybe more - we could maybe get five per cent of this," muses Mr Fishburn. "Or look at it another way. The powered access market in the UK is around 5-6,000 units annually, and there are probably around 2-3,000 pop-ups sold each year. If you add together end users plus tool hirers and traditional access rental companies, and then help them to develop the market by targeting the right customers, there's plenty to go at."

If the plan works as well as Messrs Honeywood and Fishburn predict, it won't just be Italians saying bravo to Senor Bravi. Leonardo, the original one, would have been proud.

By Paul Howard