Can you tell us a bit about yourself and your role as an industry leader?
I am a German engineer born in Saxony, the former eastern part of Germany and I am one of the three managing directors of BANG Kransysteme, a 100% family-owned enterprise that has become a benchmark for high-performance process cranes. BANG Kransysteme was founded in 1989 by my father, Werner Bang, who is still supporting our management team – the same year as the Berlin wall was torn down and Germany was united again. Thanks to his visionary steps to build a company based on quality and partnership, my brother and I have the honour to take this venture to the global market.
I lead the company alongside my brother Marcus, and my role is defined by the responsibility of developing a family business that started in the garage of our home as a service and repair workshop for hoists with our father as the first employee in 1989 and steering our company towards a digitalised, automated future with a global market. What began as a oneman show is now a supplier of process cranes with customers on four continents.
Leading an industry-tier crane manufacturer requires more than just administrative oversight and deep technical understanding, it’s also defined by understanding different cultures’ approaches to conducting business and solving lifting tasks. Developing a family business also requires a bit of endurance – something that is a familiar challenge to me as a regular participant of cross-country ski marathons such as Vasaloppet, with perfect training opportunities to ski in and bike on the local Ore Mountains ridge.
Our investments in people and assets required some patience, but it paid off. Today, we don’t just manufacture solid steel structures for high performance cranes; we create intelligent logistical nodes with smart, integrated automation solutions for various industries. We call our automated cranes large capacity robots. In my role, I prioritise a culture where our engineers and skilled craftsmen are encouraged to be ‘problem solvers’ rather than ‘order takers’.
Beyond the walls of our Crane Campus in Oelsnitz, I see my role as an advocate for the German Mittelstand. We are the backbone of the industrial economy, and I strive to demonstrate that a medium-sized company can outpace global conglomerates through agility and specialised expertise. As a leader, I am heavily involved in strategic partnerships, such as our collaboration with Siemens as a solution partner. This allows us to integrate cutting-edge control technology directly into our mechanical designs from the earliest conceptual stages. Sustainability also plays a major role for our products.
We are focused on making ‘Green Lifting’ a reality, ensuring that our cranes are not just powerful, but energy efficient. Every crane that leaves our factory is equipped with a regenerative power system and saves up to 45% of infeed power. My goal is to ensure that BANG Kransysteme remains a synonym for reliability and technical pioneering in sectors as diverse as the automotive and paper industry, the steel industry and the highly sensitive nuclear sector.
Ultimately, my role is about building trust – with our employees, our partners and our global clients who rely on our machines to keep their production lines safely moving 24/7.
Can you tell us how you got into this industry and why?
I studied mechanical engineering at Chemnitz and Dresden technical universities and entered our family business in 2010 after some years gaining insights in other industries. Before that, my brother and I have actually always been in the crane industry as it formed in front of our eyes in the garage of our home since we were kids.
For us, it was a quite natural thing to grow up with steel structures in our yard and the smell of welding fumes and grease.
By that, entering the crane industry was not just a career choice for me; it was the backdrop of my childhood. Growing up in a family of engineers, I was exposed to the smell of welding fumes and the sight of steel girders in our yard long before I understood the complexities of load calculation or winch design. My father founded the company in 1989 – a pivotal year in German history – and watching him build the business from the ground up instilled in me a profound respect for the ‘maker’ culture.
However, I didn’t join the family business immediately. I believed it was vital to forge my own path and gain an outside perspective. I pursued my studies in mechanical engineering at the Technical University of Chemnitz and later in Dresden, specialising in design and manufacturing technology. These years were foundational, providing me with the theoretical tools needed to understand the structural integrity required for building best-in-class cranes.
After completing my studies and gaining international exposure in England, I moved to Munich in 2006. Working in a different industrial environment was a masterclass in professional management and process optimisation. Yet, by 2010, the pull of the family legacy became undeniable. We initiated a long-term succession plan to ensure the continuity of BANG Kransysteme.
I returned to the family business not just out of duty, but because of a genuine passion to use my experience to further improve our products and bring them to the international market. There is a specific kind of satisfaction in seeing a complex problem – like moving a 400t ladle with molten steel with millimetre precision – solved by a machine your team designed and built from scratch. This industry offers unique challengers as it represents the perfect intersection of traditional craftsmanship and high-tech engineering. In the lifting industry, you aren’t just moving heavy objects; you are moving the very materials that build our world and keep it moving, from the steel in our buildings and bridges to the engines in our transport and energy systems. That sense of fundamental importance is what continues to drive me every day.
What makes your company stand out?
What sets BANG Kransysteme apart is our ‘all-inone’ philosophy, which we have physicalised in our Crane Campus in Oelsnitz. In an era where many manufacturers outsource components and engineering, we have intentionally moved in the opposite direction.
On our campus, we house every stage of the value chain: From the initial feasibility study and mechanical design to electrical engineering, software development, heavy-duty production in our integrated steel workshop and milling line as well and long-term service.
This vertical integration allows us to be incredibly agile. If a client in the steel industry needs a specialised process crane for a high-temperature environment with custom sway control, our mechanical engineers can walk across the hall to the software department to synchronise the logic in real-time. This synergy results in what we call ‘Tailor-Made Heavy Duty’. We don’t believe in ‘off-the-shelf’ solutions because no two industrial processes are identical.
Furthermore, our technical specialisation is a key differentiator. We handle loads of up to 500t and specialise in environments where failure is not an option. For example, for transport of molten metal in the steel industry as well as in the nuclear sector, our cranes must adhere to the highest safety standards, requiring redundant systems and fail-safe logic that few others can provide.
We focus on leading our industry in digitalisation. With CranoMatic our in house developed crane and warehouse management system, transport orders flightpaths of the load can be optimised using AI to constantly optimise automated lifting operations – with the crane ultimately becoming a large capacity robot.
Further, with our CraneBRO – the BANG remote operating station – remote-controlled process cranes can be managed from a safe, ergonomic working space with same or higher productivity in comparison to cabin controlled crane.
Finally, our regional identity makes us stand out. We are deeply rooted in the Vogtland. This creates a level of employee loyalty and craftsmanship pride that you rarely find in larger, anonymous corporations. When a BANG crane leaves our factory, it carries the reputation of our crane family, with ‘Made in Germany’ as a quality promise – both of which is a powerful motivator.
What do you like about the industry?
What I find most fascinating about the lifting industry is its role as the “silent enabler” of modern civilisation. It is an industry that operates mostly out of the public eye, yet without it, global trade and industrial production would come to a grinding halt.
Our challenge is gravity – managing massive forces and translating them into precise, controlled movements. There is a unique aesthetic and technical beauty in a perfectly balanced crane. Watching a 40m-wide bridge crane automatically gracefully manoeuvre a 60t press die through a factory is incredibly rewarding.
I also deeply appreciate the collaborative nature of the industry. Although we are competitors, there is a shared understanding among lifting professionals about our responsibility. Safety is not a marketing buzzword here; it is a life-and-death requirement. This creates a culture of rigorous standards and continuous improvement that I find very grounding.
Additionally, I love the current transition we are in. We are moving from the ‘Mechanical Age’ to the ‘Digital Age’ of lifting. This evolution keeps the industry fresh and intellectually stimulating. We are now grappling with artificial intelligence, digital twins and remote diagnostics. Being at the forefront of this change – means that we are constantly learning. The lifting industry offers a rare combination of heavy engineering heritage and the cutting-edge of technological innovation. It is an industry where you can be a builder, a software developer and a visionary intralogistics process creator all at the same time.
Why should people want to join and work in this industry?
In the spirit of Global Lifting Awareness Day (GLAD), I want to challenge the outdated perception that the crane industry is just about ‘grease and steel’. If you are a young person looking for a career that combines hightech innovation with real-world impact, there is no better place to be. First, the variety of roles is staggering. We need structural engineers to design the ‘bones’ of the crane, but we also need software developers to write the ‘brain’, electronic technicians to build the ‘nervous system’ and data scientists to analyse the ‘senses’ of the machine. Working in this industry means you are part of a multidisciplinary team solving the fundamental challenges of gravity and logistics.
Second, this is an industry where you contribute to global progress and sustainability. Every time we install an energy efficient crane in a press shop or a steel mill, we are helping that company reduce its carbon footprint. Our work directly impacts the efficiency of the world’s most important supply chains. Joining the lifting industry means you are helping to build the infrastructure of the future.
At BANG Kransysteme, we place a high value on our “next generation”. We invest heavily in vocational training on our Crane Campus because we know that our technical expertise is our most valuable asset. We offer our trainees a path where they can see a project through from a raw sheet of steel to a finished, automated system. Moreover, the lifting industry offers a level of job security and stability that many trendy tech sectors lack.
As long as the world needs buildings, energy, cars and infrastructure, it will need cranes. We are looking for people who want to leave a mark – people who want to point at a massive structure in a factory 20 years from now and say, “I helped build that”. It is a career of pride, precision and purpose.
What are your expectations for the industry going forward? Any trends or challenges?
The lifting industry is at a major crossroads, and the next decade will likely see more transformation than the previous 50 years combined. The most significant trends are automation and digitalisation with the full integration of AI. We are moving beyond simple automation towards intelligent large capacity robots. One of the biggest challenges will be the shortage of skilled labour. This is a global issue, but it hits the specialised engineering sector particularly hard. To overcome this, we must not only innovate our products but also our recruitment. We have to make companies attractive places to work in combination with providing job roles and salaries that attract the younger generation. Technically, I see a massive push towards predictive maintenance. Using AI and sensor data, we can now predict when a component will fail before it actually does.
This is crucial for our clients in the automotive or steel sectors, where an hour of downtime can cost hundreds of thousands of euros. We are also seeing a shift towards ‘digital twins’ – virtual models of cranes that allow us to simulate stresses and optimise performance before the physical crane is even built. Decarbonisation is another major driver. As our clients strive for ‘green steel’ and carbon-neutral production, they are looking to us to provide the most energy efficient solutions possible. This means more regenerative drives and smarter load-path planning to minimise energy consumption.
Finally, the challenge of safety and regulation in an automated world will be paramount. As cranes become more autonomous, the software becomes a safety-critical component. Navigating the regulatory landscape for autonomous machines in human-occupied spaces will require intense collaboration between manufacturers, software developers and safety regulators. I expect to see a move towards more standardised communication protocols between cranes and other factory systems, making the crane a central hub in the smart factory of the future.
Are there any projects or initiatives that your company is working on that you’re excited about?
I am incredibly excited about several initiatives we are currently driving forward on our Crane Campus. One of our standout projects involves the development of fully automated tool transport cranes for the automotive industry. These systems are revolutionising press shops by allowing for rapid, autonomous tool changes integrated into production environments without fences enabled by smart people recognition.
Finally, our in-house development of CranoMatic and CraneBRO continues to yield exciting results. We are currently working on automating intralogistics processes that utilises the idea of large capacity robots being integrated into a production environment to its fullest extent. This also features a digital twin, and by creating a 100% accurate digital representation of a crane, we can train operators in a virtual environment and test automation scripts long before the crane is installed on-site. This significantly reduces commissioning times and increases safety. These initiatives show that BANG Kransysteme is not just a crane builder; we are a technology company that is shaping the future of intralogistics. I want to express my greatest gratitude to my family, and especially to my father, whose relentless efforts and long-term vision built the foundation of our business, as well as every team member, costumer and partner. Thank you for taking this journey with us.
Finally, we will keep shaping the future of intralogistics. Together.
