Consigning a whole line, or a whole plant

Consigning 1 machine is a conversation. Consigning a line or a plant is a project, and the difference is not the number of machines. It is that a closure has dates in it that will not move, and every decision on the equipment side is downstream of them.

Find the 2 dates first

The lease or site handover date. It usually will not move, and it is the outer wall of the whole plan.

The day utilities go off. This is the one that catches people. Power, lighting, compressed air and water get canceled the moment the plant stops making anything, which is exactly when the removal crews need them. Set the shut-off dates against the removal schedule, in writing, and keep them live in the removal zone until the last machine leaves.

Write both dates down in week 1 and share them with everybody who touches equipment.

Name 1 person who owns the equipment

From the first list to the last truck. Not a committee, and not whoever is still in the building in the final month. This single decision is worth more than any negotiation, because it is the only way the small daily calls get made: whether that motor may be borrowed, where the tooling goes, who has the manuals.

Split the floor deliberately

Almost no closure is a single route. The usual split:

• Consign the machines with a real second-hand market: complete, sound, general-purpose enough that somebody else runs one. These ship to our warehouse and are sold to users.
• Auction the general plant equipment, the racking and the mixed lots. An auction clears what nobody else will take, and that is a genuine strength.
• Scrap what has no second user, honestly and quickly.
• Redeploy inside your own group where the answer to who, when and out of whose budget exists today.

Send us the list and we will tell you which items belong in the consign pile, before anybody pays for freight on something that should not move.

Sequence removals by access, not by value

The natural instinct is to take the valuable machines out first. The building disagrees. A machine that has to be moved twice is charged twice, and the machine at the back of the bay dictates the order of everything in front of it. Walk the route in the direction the machines will travel, and build the schedule from the access, then check the dates still work.

The pack every crew needs

Floor loading limits, the route with overhead clearances, dock and door clear dimensions measured rather than remembered, the hazardous material register, residual energy per machine, and 1 person with keys who knows where the isolators are. Use the site permit-to-work system you already have rather than inventing a closure version of it.

Documentation, for the people who will ask later

On a closure the paper trail matters as much as the machines, particularly if a receiver, a lender or an asset manager is involved.

• Every machine consigned under a written agreement, signed before it ships.
• Every machine checked in against your list on arrival, with mismatches raised then, not later.
• Ownership, lien and title questions resolved before a machine is accepted.
• Every machine signed out of the building: what it was, its number, who took it, when, on whose authority.
• Photographs of the empty footprints and the condition of floor, walls and doors.

What consignment does and does not do here

Consignment gets the good machines off your floor now and sells them to users rather than to whoever turns up on auction day. It does not empty a building by a fixed date, and we will not pretend otherwise. If the whole site must be clear by a date that is close, say the date first. It changes the advice, and it may well change the route for most of the floor.

Send us what you have, even half a list. We will tell you what is worth consigning, what is not, and what the agreement would cover before anything ships.