QMC Cranes

Jack Dorris was a precast-concrete veteran in the 1970s when he grew tired of telephoning crane companies to deliver and set the product his firms made. He decided, plausibly enough, that precasters would be able to compete more effectively if they had their own cranes — purpose-built, truck-mounted, ready to lift the moment the truck arrived on site. The first one he built was a rear-mounted boom truck he called the Quik Lift. He soon renamed the firm Quick Manufacturing Company — QMC — and designed and built custom hydraulic cranes from a single facility in Sparks, Nevada, for the next four decades. In 2019 the firm was acquired by Jensen Infrastructure, the Reno-headquartered precast and infrastructure firm whose own erection crews had been a principal customer for the boom-truck product line since the 1970s.

The firm designs and manufactures hydraulic boom-truck cranes — the specialised, truck-mounted lifting equipment used by precast-concrete erectors, utility contractors, oil-and-gas service companies, sign and steel installers, and the various other industrial trades that need to bring lifting capacity to a site rather than mobilise a separate crane crew. Each crane is configured to the customer’s application: boom length, lifting capacity, mounting geometry, hydraulic-system specification, and the truck chassis it will be paired with are all chosen for the work the crane will do. Engineering, fabrication, welding, hydraulics, paint, and final assembly all happen at the Sparks facility.

What distinguishes QMC Cranes in its sector is the unusual character of its 2019 acquisition. Most American crane manufacturers of QMC’s vintage were absorbed into the global heavy-equipment groups — Manitowoc, Tadano, Liebherr, and the rest — over the course of the 2000s and 2010s. QMC’s acquirer was instead a privately held precast-concrete operator headquartered a few miles away in Reno, whose own erection crews had been a principal customer for the boom-truck product line since the 1970s. The acquisition aligned the firm operationally with the customer set it had been founded to serve; the Sparks facility, the engineering team, and the catalogue continue to serve precast erectors, utility contractors, and the other markets the firm has accumulated over its history. With the acquisition, QMC also became a sister firm of Jensen MetalTech, the metal-fabrication division of the same parent.

The practice has worked with QMC Cranes at the Sparks facility on Lean process implementation across design, fabrication, and assembly operations; the engagement coincided with the period of the firm’s 2019 acquisition by Jensen Infrastructure.