Automating a warehouse doesn't remove lifting equipment from it — it adds more. The AS/RS crane gets the attention because it's the headline asset, but the gantry crane over the fabrication bay, the MEWP used for high-bay rack access, the goods lift moving totes between mezzanine levels and the dock leveller at every bay are still lifting equipment under the Lifting Operations and Lifting Equipment Regulations 1998, automated facility or not.
That distinction matters because the maintenance attention in a newly automated site gravitates toward the automation itself. LOLER-registered equipment that predates the automation project, or sits alongside it doing unglamorous work, is exactly the equipment most likely to have its statutory examination schedule drift while everyone is focused on commissioning the shuttles.
Why this is easy to get wrong
The legal duty sits with the employer for the life of every piece of lifting equipment on the register — before first use, between scheduled examinations, after any exceptional circumstance, and on the day an HSE inspector actually shows up. It doesn't pause because the equipment sits inside a facility where most of the other assets report their own condition automatically.
The stakes are not abstract. HSE's most recent reporting year recorded 124 worker fatalities across Great Britain and 59,219 RIDDOR-reportable employee injuries, with workplace injury and ill health costing the economy an estimated £22.9 billion. Lifting equipment failures are a recurring category in that toll, which is the entire reason the thorough-examination regime exists independent of whatever else is automated on site.
What actually needs an exam, and how often
The interval depends on the equipment and, for some assets, a written scheme of examination — not a single blanket rule. As a baseline:
- Lifting accessories — chains, slings, shackles: every 6 months, and the first category people forget exists once the accessory is bolted into an automated cell rather than carried around by hand.
- Forklifts, reach trucks and MEWPs — every 12 months, or per a written scheme if duty cycle or environment justifies a shorter interval.
- Goods lifts and mini-load hoists integrated into automated storage — governed by the written examination scheme for that specific installation, which is where automated-facility LOLER programmes most often go wrong: the scheme was written for the equipment as commissioned, and nobody revisits it when duty cycle changes.
- Trigger events that override the default interval entirely — before first use if assembled on site, after installation at a new location, and after any exceptional circumstance such as damage or a near-miss.
Where the paper trail actually breaks
Most LOLER programmes we've seen inside automated facilities are not failing because nobody is doing the examinations. They're failing because the record of those examinations lives somewhere a regulator, an insurer or an OEM warranty assessor can't actually verify on the day it matters.
A spreadsheet or paper folder has no tamper-proof audit trail — there is no way to show when a record was created or changed, or by whom, which is exactly what an HSE inspection is checking for. Shared logins compound it: two people editing the same tracker at once produces two versions of the truth, and an overdue examination is only caught when someone happens to look. HSE inspections are unannounced. If retrieving the record for one crane takes an afternoon of folder-hunting, the record is not available in any meaningful sense, whatever its condition once found.
How we approach it
This is a compliance problem before it's a maintenance problem, and we built for that split deliberately. Every completed inspection or PM task in Reliabilytics is timestamped, tied to the individual engineer who performed it — no shared logins — and stored with whatever evidence was captured, so retrieval is a search, not an afternoon.
The statutory side doesn’t sit in a separate spreadsheet next to the CMMS either. When the AI reads an OEM manual for a gantry crane, MEWP or goods lift, it captures the manufacturer’s service intervals alongside whatever LOLER examination cadence applies to that asset class, so the automated facility’s "boring" lifting equipment gets the same disciplined schedule as the shuttle fleet everyone was already watching closely.