Its capital city Atlanta hosts the Georgia Aquarium and the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site, dedicated to the African-American leader’s life and times. Not forgetting the city of Savannah, with its 18th- and 19th-century architecture and leafy public squares. Augusta hosts the Masters golf tournament.
Georgia’s top manufacturers are representative of the state’s powerful industrial sector, home to major aeronautics firms, auto manufacturers and food processing companies.
Georgia may be known as the Peach State, but when it comes to overhead cranes, there are a large number of manufacturers and distributors, many of them in business for more than five decades.
Not surprisingly, most of the overhead bridge crane companies in Georgia are located in Atlanta, the state’s capital and largest metropolitan area. However, other major cities in the state have at least one crane company in the surrounding area.
Interestingly, there are a handful of overhead crane companies that have multiple locations throughout the state. This makes for easy access to their products and services from anywhere within the southeastern US state.
To mention a few, are Material Handling Systems, Power and Motion – which sells Gorbel’s ergonomic workstation bridge cranes and R&M Materials Handling’s overhead crane systems, KCI of Georgia overhead crane distributor, Engineered Systems, Gajjar Engineered Systems, Royce Crane Co. USA Crane & Hoist Services and Applied Handling Systems.
KCI just celebrated its 33rd anniversary, offering sales, parts and service centers for overhead cranes and hoists.
Hussey Gay Bell is no stranger to one of the largest corporate enterprises in Georgia and helped to design and construct a new Gulfstream Wing assembly building at Gulfstream Aerospace Corp. in Savannah, GA.
The facility includes three overhead cranes, two loading docks, utility floor trenches, paint booth, assembly area, offices, shipping and receiving, and a food service area for employees.
Careful coordination of site layout and design was required with the Federal Aviation Administration and Savannah Airport Commission to avoid encroachment into the established BRL (Building Restriction Line) and line of sight from the aircraft control tower. Site design also included overall campus coordination to ensure future development conformance to two municipal code requirements, analysis of the entire campus to confirm compliance with both overall and specific site tree and landscape requirements, and analysis of the specific site and overall campus stormwater management related to storm water quality.
Also adhering to proprietary construction technology is PNK Group USA which will construct a 1.2 million-square-foot industrial building at PNK Park Southern Gateway at Lambert Farms in McDonough, due to be completed by the end of the year.
The building’s structural frame, featuring reinforced concrete columns, allows for the installation of technology, production equipment, or overhead crane beams with a lifting capacity of up to 8 tons without complex reconstruction.
PNK Group USA has already completed two industrial buildings totaling 1.5 million square feet at PNK Park Southern Gateway, with two more buildings planned for the future. The company has experimented with using concrete girders and replacing steel columns with reinforced concrete columns on other projects, including PNK Park Humboldt in Hazelton, PA, and PNK Park—Great Stream Commons in Allenwood, PA.
This has resulted in an increase in bolted connections and fewer welded connections, with plans to eliminate welded joints altogether through expanded in-house manufacturing.
PNK Group USA’s proprietary technology involves the use of prefab large-unit blocks, simplifying the construction process and enhancing building functionality and reliability, minimizing extensive labor and heavy machinery.
Additionally, Hyundai Motor Group Metaplant America (HMGMA) will start production in Q4 2024 (with a grand opening next year) of its Hyundai and Genesis electric vehicles, and Electrified GV70, along with its hydrogen-powered XCIENT Fuel Cell Truck, for logistics between Hyundai’s manufacturing facilities and suppliers.
Hyundai Motor Group is investing $7.59bn to develop HMGMA, which will create 8,500 direct jobs. Additionally, Hyundai and SKOn are building a $5bn EV battery cell plant in Bartow County, Georgia that will employ 3,500 workers.
HMGMA is Hyundai Motor Group’s first dedicated Electric Vehicle mass-production plant located in Bryan County, Georgia. The new plant will boast a highly connected, automated, and flexible manufacturing system, which organically connects all elements of the EV ecosystem. The Georgia facility will become an intelligent manufacturing plant. All processes of production— order collection, procurement, logistics and production—will be optimized utilizing AI and data.
“Georgia is like a second home to us,” said José Muñoz, president/global COO, Hyundai Motor Company, and president and CEO, Hyundai and Genesis Motor North America. “On behalf of all of us at Hyundai Motor Group, we are very proud that Hyundai’s investments in Georgia will create tens of thousands of great paying American jobs and bring tens of billions of dollars in economic impact for decades to come. Thank you to our partners and to the great people of Georgia for your support and for making us feel so much at home.”
“For decades, Hyundai Motor Group has been an incredible partner to our state, and we knew exactly what kind of historic benefits a project like this would bring to hardworking Georgians when we first began talks with HMG,” said Governor Brian Kemp. “Hyundai is with us at the table, helping us recruit businesses, giving back to our communities, and working with our worldclass colleges and universities to connect more Georgians with great opportunities. We share a focus on the future, and we’re excited for what our long-term partnership will bring for the coastal region and all of Georgia.”
“2024 is going to be a great year for HMGMA,” said Oscar Kwon, president and CEO, HMGMA. “This is the largest economic development project in Georgia’s history, and we have been moving at a rapid speed. Completing a project of this scale on this timeline has been a challenge, but our team has delivered amazing results. We owe a lot of this to the hard work of our Meta Pros and the continued support and cooperation of our state and local partners, including the Savannah Harbor- Interstate 16 Joint Development Authority.”
Seeing the potential for business, ProLift Rigging has opened a full-service branch outside of Atlanta, GA, offering 155,000 square feet of space for storage, buffering and equipment integration. The new location is equipped with a range of specialized heavy lifting equipment, including cranes of various capacities, gantry systems, forklifts, versa lifts, hydraulic jacks and engineered rigging systems.
“Atlanta is a key addition to our national branch network,” said Jesse Taylor, president and CEO, The ProLift Rigging Company. “This location will allow us to offer strategic and scalable support for our national clients and assist with local Georgiabased projects.”
The Atlanta branch will provide industrial services such as crane and heavy rigging, machinery moving, heavy-haul transportation and secure indoor/outdoor storage. As the 13th branch in ProLift’s North American network, it serves as a hub for field crews and equipment, ready to support projects in South Carolina, Florida, Alabama and Southern Tennessee. The branch also houses ProLift’s regional project managers and engineers.
