CEO DIARIES
Above: CEO Steve Ekström with developer Ngoc Do during NS100E development work at Noswing’s Vaasa test facility.
Above right: Developer Joel Bjons testing the NS100E on Noswing’s full- scale crane in Vaasa.
Are there any projects or initiatives that your company is working on that you’re excited about? I am particularly excited about the NS100E, the new generation of our anti-sway system. It uses Modbus TCP communication, making measured rope-angle information available to a broad range of industrial control systems. Our aim is to reduce the effort required from integrators while allowing them to retain control of their own PLC or drive application. Much of the NS100E development and testing has
taken place on our full-scale crane here in Vaasa. It gives us a practical way to move between the software, the sensor and the behaviour of a real suspended load. Joel Bjons and Ngoc Do have been closely involved in developing and testing the new sensor, working directly with the crane to see how the measurement performs during real movement. We are developing versions and integration packages
for different control environments, including Siemens PLC-based systems and ABB ACS880 drives. The central idea remains the same: measure the movement of the suspended load and use that feedback to support smoother, more controlled crane motion. The precast-concrete retrofit is one example of this gradual approach. Rather than replacing the crane or
18 | October 2026 |
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removing the operator, it adds measured anti-sway and operator-supervised travel to a repetitive movement. Projects like this are important because they show that a plant can take a meaningful step towards automation without redesigning the entire process. We are also continuing to develop our digital
and automation capabilities. Simulation and virtual commissioning allow us to study control behaviour on a representation of the customer’s crane before changes are made on site. In a complex automatic project, problems can then be identified earlier, and the people commissioning the crane arrive better prepared. At the most advanced end, we work with cranes that
are integrated into customers’ production systems. In these applications, the production system tells the crane what must be moved and where it should go. The crane then carries out the movement as part of the wider production flow. How far we automate depends on the realities of each site and the conditions in which the crane operates. What excites me is the possibility of giving customers
a realistic progression. They can start by improving the behaviour of an existing manually operated crane, add semi-automatic movements where these make sense and move towards greater automation when the process is ready. This makes automation a practical development path rather than a single disruptive leap.
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