Heavy-Duty Goods Lift for Steel Rolling Mill in Jamshedpur
⚠ The Challenge
The client operates a steel rolling and processing facility in Adityapur Industrial Area, Jamshedpur — one of India’s oldest and largest heavy industry clusters. Steel coils weighing 3-5 tonnes needed to move between the ground-floor rolling mill and the first-floor slitting and cut-to-length line. The existing method used an overhead crane with slings to hoist coils through a floor opening — a 40-minute process requiring 3 riggers, with constant risk of sling failure and coil drop. Two near-miss incidents in 6 months forced management to find a permanent solution.
✔ Our Solution
Nio Equipment designed a 5-tonne capacity hydraulic goods lift with a 6-metre travel height and reinforced 3m x 2.5m platform specifically engineered for steel coil handling. The platform featured V-block cradles to prevent coil rolling during transit. Guide rails and the platform structure used heavy-gauge steel with abrasion-resistant coating to withstand the harsh mill environment. Interlocked rolling shutter doors at both levels, overload protection and a manual lowering system completed the safety package. The hydraulic power unit was installed in a separate room to protect it from mill scale and dust.
Key Results
The Challenge
Jamshedpur’s Adityapur Industrial Area is India’s second-largest industrial cluster, housing over 1,200 companies — predominantly in steel processing, automotive ancillaries and heavy engineering. This steel rolling mill processes HR coils into cold-rolled sheets, slit coils and cut-to-length plates across a 2-storey facility. The 3-5 tonne coils needed to move between floors 25+ times per shift, but the only vertical transport was an overhead crane hoisting through a floor opening using wire slings — slow, dangerous and blocking the crane from other tasks.
Our Solution
Nio Equipment engineered a goods lift purpose-built for steel mill conditions: 5-tonne capacity with 25% overload margin, abrasion-resistant coatings on all surfaces, sealed hydraulic cylinders to prevent mill scale ingress, and custom V-block cradles on the platform to secure round coils during transit. The 3m x 2.5m platform accommodates the largest coil dimensions in the client’s product range.
Results
Transfer cycle time dropped from 40 minutes to 8 minutes — an 80% improvement that eliminated the production bottleneck. The crane is now available full-time for material handling on the mill floor. Most importantly, the rigging operation — which had generated two near-miss incidents in 6 months — has been completely eliminated. The client has since enquired about a second goods lift for their adjacent galvanising line.
“We were handling 5-tonne coils with slings through a floor hole — every shift I worried about a coil drop. The goods lift has eliminated that risk entirely. It’s the single best safety investment we’ve made.”— Plant Manager, Steel Processing Plant, Jamshedpur